Remember
by Kiana Caelum
Summary: A short story with a twist.Tam Slone never dreamed she would meet her soulmate, let alone that he would be the angry, crazy boy she had spent most of her life avoiding, or that there was a jealous darkness waiting to tear them apart.
1. Default Chapter

**Remember**

_I had a dream last night. You were there._

She was running through a maze, the branches parting before her like green mists. The cloying fragrance of pine hung around, overwhelming her senses.

Someone was chasing her.

Anyone could see what her flushed face and over-bright green eyes meant. As she glanced behind, her dark hair, tumbling loose from its pins, caught copper in the light.

"Catch me if you can," she called back, running on and on through endless green tunnels, her laughter rippling through the labyrinth.

It was an art, that was obvious. Run fast enough to make him chase, but slow enough to keep his interest.

Through path after path, past slender statues of roaring lions and spread-winged dragons. Hearing his footsteps, his teasing voice calling her name with a richness of promise that made something hot turn low in her stomach.

She burst into the centre of the maze, flinging back her head into the harsh sunlight that broke into this world of green-tinted softness, sweeping her skirts about her. She had dressed as a maid, because no one looking for the Lady Anastacia would glance twice at someone in a maid's garb.

A mosaic lay at the centre, the remnants of an old Roman villa that had once stood here. It had fantastical beasts on it, unicorns and dragons and phoenix. Oh, she thought...if only she could be like them, and fly free from the cage of her duty.

Duty, duty, duty. Her duty to marry well, to give her family power...

She didn't want to marry for duty. She wanted to marry for love.

Her duty was a man of power, a comte who held many lands. He was well-liked by the Church, and he was handsome beyond her dreams. But he was cold. There was an ice in him she could not reach past, and it frightened her. When he issued punishment, there was no compassion to temper him.

And her love...was her love. A lesser noble, but noble all the same, who pretended to play visitor to her duty's court for her sake, who sent not a glance her way while she played courtesan, who whispered love to her when ever they stood near, alone. "M'amour, we will not let him stand in our way," he had said firmly.

But Ana saw no way out. If her duty caught her, it would be the guillotine for her love, and perhaps for her too.

But she would risk it.

She waited, her eyes two sparkling stars that grew soft and heavy with anticipation.

Come on, she urged, spinning around idly, her outstretched fingers tips brushing the tickling needles. But she saw only one empty pathway after another. Silence, the only presence that of the aromatic pine.

Someone grabbed her.

She shrieked with shock and delight, and turned to the man holding. "Oh, you sc-"

And stopped.

It wasn't her love.

It was her hate.

"What...I..." Panic snatched the words from her mouth, leaving only dryness. "Mon comte, please...don't."

His cold eyes swept her. "I warned you, Ana."

All the sun seemed to have drained away. "I don't want you!" she screamed frantically. From the corner of her eye, she saw guards step, the light catching dully from their bronze breastplates, but their faces only shadowy silhouettes.

And two of them...they held her Other.

"I want him," she gasped fiercely, half a statement, half a plea.

She stared at her betrothed's face. Too young to rule so much, they all said. Not young enough, she knew. "You said I had to choose," she whispered, trying to reach past the stone in him. Emotion lay under there, but buried deep. "Choose and pay the price. Would you take that away?"

That reached him; a corner of his mouth twitched. "Choose then," he said flatly. "Choose damn you, and take the consequences. Him or me. Death or life."

"Ana..." Her Other, and she turned to look at him. His eyes were a pure clear sapphire, as open as her comte's lay closed. He seemed to search for words, even as he hung in the grip of the guards he had once been part of. "Be careful," he said finally. "Choose carefully."

"Choose quickly," her comte said. There was nothing pure in his face, however royal the blood in his veins. "Time is running out."

How dare he threaten her? How could he? He was supposed to love her. Ana wrenched free of her betrothed's grip and stepped back, drawing herself up. "To hell with the consequences," she spat. "It will always be him. He is the one I love."

"So be it," her comte said softly. He looked beyond her to the guards, and turning, dread a molten lead in her stomach, Ana turned and saw the blue sheen on the blade of an axe.

She stared at her Other and saw the growing horror in his eyes, black as his hair. "No..." she breathed.

Her duty waved a languid hand and smiled coldly. "Death, I think, will become you."

X - X - X - X - X

"Tam!" Someone nudged her.

She blinked. She had been daydreaming again.

"What?" she mumbled. Her head was resting uncomfortably on her arm, she realised, and she sat up a little. From her wry glance, the teacher had noticed, but Ms. Binns had a soft heart. And Tam was acing history.

Rob Slivan looked faintly puzzled. "Principal wants to see you. What've you been doing now, Tam?"

"Nothing," she said, frowning. Her eyes, brown and soft as velvet, moved to the rest of the class who were watching her, trying to see her reaction.

Rob Slivan was the ideal boy-next-door. In fact...he was the boy-next-door. He was Tam's neighbour, and she had known him since she was born. And she knew him rather too well for her liking. "Pigs might fly."

She gave him a cool look. "How do you think Danish bacon gets here? For once, Rob, I am totally innocent."

"I know you," he said as she got up, sweeping her books into her bag. "You were never innocent."

"Excuse me, you certainly have no proof of that."

Rob grinned, and it lit him up. He was handsome, Tam supposed, with his dark blond hair cut short to show off a face that was bright and more often smiling than not. They had dated once...only once, because they had both ended up in fits of laughter every time they even thought about kissing. After that, they had given up, decided it obviously wasn't meant to be, and had a lot of fun setting each other up.

"Have fun," he said cheerfully.

She flashed him a bright smile. Maybe some people wouldn't have carried out a conversation where the entire class could hear and wonder, but Rob and Tam were different.

They were part of the popular crowd.

And they both hated it, because in this town, popular meant something else entirely.

It meant cruelty covered in chic clothes. It meant ugliness hidden under money, beauty, or connections. It meant playing with the people who weren't worth caring about. It meant laughing at anyone different in day, and hurting them under the shield of darkness.

It meant vampire hunter.

X - X- X - X - X

It looked like cranberry juice. It wasn't.

The boy and the girl sat in a quiet corner of the campus, avoiding the classes that could teach them nothing because they had both learned what the real lesson of life was. Put up, shut up and take what you're given.

Both had seen the flaw in this immediately. There had, after all, to be someone who was doing the giving.

They had made sure it was them.

"He's late again," the boy said levelly, turning the glass. The liquid was thickening already, clinging to the crystal. This was a celebration, but there was little festivity to it. "What is it this time?"

The boy alone would have made people stop and stare. Simply for his hair, which was a spiky stark blue, and his snow-white skin, as if sunlight didn't touch him. That wasn't so far from the truth.

"You know Aspen."

But the girl...she would have made people stop and run.

"I take it that means he's done something foolish again." His face was still as an ice-sculpture. All hard lines, from his narrow eyes to the angled cheekbones, softened only by the sensuous curve of his mouth.

"The principal wants to see him. Who knows what for. You know Martin - he doesn't give a damn about anything. He's careless. Risky." The girl's voice had a slight accent, one that matched the Romany promise in her shiny black eyes.

The boy shrugged. "That's what makes him the best. He has innovation, you have integrity and I..."

"You are death."

Silence quivered, matching the wind over the grass. The boy raised his hooded eyes to the girl. "That's quite a compliment. And if I didn't know better, I'd say you feared me."

His voice was mild. But his eyes were two endless blue wells, filled with remote interest and cruelty..

The girl didn't blink, or swallow, or do anything but take a sip from her glass. There was a dusky golden tinge to her skin, and her eyes dominated her face. But they were not what an onlooker would notice first.

She was completely bald. Both ears were pierced, and a chain ran from each into her nose, as well as a pair of flashing orange stones that dangled from her lobes.

"Not at all." The lie was barely detectable. But the boy saw it all the same, and stored it in his heart. It would be useful one day. "When all's said and done, you can die. We all can."

"Alone...possibly, yes. Though it's unlikely." The boy smashed her glass with one hand, holding his hand up for her to observe, not seeming to care about the scarlet rivulets crawling over his hand before his skin healed. "But when we combined our powers..."

He picked up his glass and hurled it into the air.

It spun, flashing crazily in the sunlight. He uncoiled his hand and it exploded from the inside out into a shimmering powder that fluttered down, catching on the girl's eyelashes.

"Together," he said softly, "we are everything."

The girl took a deep breath. "Aspen will be here soon," she said, averting her eyes from the boy's striking face. All pretence of humanity had drained from it, leaving it serene and unearthly.

Yes. She did fear him. But she was almost sure he would not kill her. Almost.

Once, there had been more like their trio. All young. None of them with more than a score years behind them. All old. The darkness that lived in them was beyond the touch of time.

Creatures craving power, fighting one another and dying for their lusts. One by one, they had died until only three were left. The best. Three of them had survived to walk out into the world.

And now each headed an organisation that even the Nightworld whispered about.

They had done deeds to chill the blood and soul. The threads of thousand of lives were entangled with their every word or action. But there was one more fundamental way the three of them were alike.

Not one of them cared.

_You held my hand so tight...I thought I'd just  
Die._

X - X- X - X - X

Comments and criticism adored.


	2. Chapter Two

Thank you so much to everyone who commented - it made my day! Thank you; **Persephone, Dead Flower, Painted Empathy, Starwisher, MyosotisLuv, Stargazer, Kittykatt, Me, Kitten**

Lyrics belong to the excellent _Drive_ by Incubus.

**Remember Part Two**

_It's driven me before and it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal._

I was your Other.

You stare at your love, at the lovely face and graceful body. Not even aware of your presence, of how your yearning fills your soul and overflows until your are a river of bubbling, brazen emotion.

Reach out, and try not to hold your breath, because creatures like you have no reverence for anything, not even the embodiment of your heart that is there, living, breathing, moving, clearly lost in the depths of their own mind. Let your fingers brush the cold glass that splits you, makes you not one but two.

But here it is.

A truth you have searched so long for, since your first waking moment in this world. You are sad that your hatred eats at you so, and sad that it is your own nature which will destroy you, as surely as it has destroyed others. But you see you salvation before you. So simple and pure.

You look at the one you love, that creature who so long ago ran from you in the walls of a pine-hazed maze, and who chose you above all else and paid dear the price for shying from duty.

But now the game has changed. For alone of the three of you, you know who you once were. They have only half-forgotten dreams that cling like thorns in a pulsing heart, pushing deeper in with each slow beat.

Death became you so well.

And this time?

This time, the axe shall fall differently.

X - X - X - X - X

Tamara Slone was deep in thought as she walked down the airy hall to the principal's office, the windows spilling in light and heat that made her brush the long curls of black hair back from her face time and time again, ignoring the prickles of sweat beading on her spine. God only knew what the miserable sod wanted her for now.

A strange sight in front of her eyes registered, and she stopped, and blinked.

There was a boy there, sitting down by the wall. The principal didn't believe in making your wait comfortable, but he had sat on the floor with his hands loosely linked around his knees. His head was resting on one arm – he was asleep, she realised and half-smiled.

She crouched down to peer at his face, wondering if she should wake him.

His eyes snapped open.

Next thing she knew, she felt like she was flying backwards, until her body hit the wall. Pain, flaring out along her spine as her neck snapped forward with the impact, and then Tam was only trying to breathe through it. It blinded her to anything for a moment, tears springing up to her eyes.

She realised the boy still had hold of her. His hands restrained her, one at her throat, the other pinioning her wrist. She recognised his fierce face.

Aspen Martin.

She knew of him, but had never exchanged more than insults after he had scratched her car and driven off.

Anger surged up, and Tam stared at him through the agony that seemed to have settled in her back like steel spheres taken straight from a furnace. Silver slices of lightning darted round her skull, pain mixed with anger.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded. Not only painful, but humiliating. And frightening. She was...completely at his mercy. This sort of thing didn't happen to people like her, not in a busy school, not in daylight, not ever!

He let go of her. The pain lessened a little as she could bend her neck gingerly, rub at her temples. "It's not wise to sneak up on sleeping...people."

She had the feeling he had caught himself. As though he'd been going to say something different.

I can't believe I thought he looked sweet, Tam thought. This is Aspen. He beat some guy's head in with a baseball bat because he didn't like how the guy was looking at him. Not exactly a contender for clear thinker of the millennium.

"Most people don't try and break my spine," she said flatly. "What's wrong with you?"

He looked sideways at her. A bright, intelligent face. It made her think of a hawk, if hawks had chocolate brown hair, except for the three ashen blond streaks that ran back from his forehead. His eyes were...

His eyes weren't human.

As Tam stared at him, the left slid from a metallic blue into sultry violet, while the right moved from a pale grey into amber. His eyes changed...and they were both different colours.

Dangerous. Jesus. What the hell was he?

He was smiling radiantly, a satisfied curve of his mouth that said he knew she was staring, and he liked it.

"Look as long as you want," he said casually.

His arrogance took her breath away. "People often stare at the freakish," she murmured pleasantly.

"Not as long as they stare at the beautiful," he countered. "What are you here for then?" He pulled out a packet of cigarettes "Oh, don't do the holier-than-thou look on me," he said. "I'm sure you have your vices too." The smile flashed again. "Tell me about them...I'd love to know." 'Love' was almost a sigh, his eyes so intense she felt he was trying to see into her soul.

There was danger in that stare.

Did her eyes scream vampire hunter, and human hunted? Was the sound of steel bars slamming in her voice, mixing with the screams of the people she had killed? Sometimes she thought she would go mad.

"I eat chocolate," she said shortly.

"Matches your skin." Smoke drifted from the cigarette in tiny spirals. Tam blinked – she hadn't seen him light it. "And your eyes. Though I prefer white chocolate, myself."

She flushed at that. She was used to dealing with people like him...there was always one. She looked the perfect Asian princess, Rob had told her jokingly, exaggerating as ever, with her large dark eyes and russet hair that waved down to her back, though her square jaw put paid to any ideas of beauty she might harbour.

But she smiled softly, and laid a hand on his arm. Static electricity made her hair stand on end and Aspen froze, his strange eyes fixing on her fingers. Then she dug her fingernails into his skin, enjoying the emotion that felt almost like a wave of heat as it shot through her, savage satisfaction.

He yelped.

"Has anyone told you you're an asshole?" she purred. Then stared.

Her nails had left gouges in his skin. But his skin was healing, the cuts were disappearing. What the hell? Oh no...he couldn't be...Aspen was a jerk, but a human jerk. Surely.

She looked at him, meeting that strange stare. One eye black and fathomless, one so pale it had no colour.

"Oops," he said softly. "Looks like my secret is out." He put the cigarette out.

On his hand.

Fear filled her, making everything crystal-clear and cold. She shouldn't have been afraid, because he was just a boy, because the principal was only three inches of plaster away, because she was Tamara Slone and her life was almost ordinary.

His lips drew back, and Tam stared. He had fangs. He was a vampire.

"Go on," he whispered around those monstrosities, his strange eyes seeming to shiver and ripple until the colour fell away to be replaced by an eldritch light that sparkled like diamonds made liquid. "Scream."

Buy time, a voice chanted. Isn't that what they always tell you?

"Argh, argh," she sad in the most derisive voice she could summon. "Oh help, the big evil vampire is going to tear out my throat. Shall I do a maidenly swoon too?" She edged back, hoping he wouldn't notice.

He was smiling. "I don't think that's very polite."

A little further back, and she was far enough.

Her foot lashed up and out, her back arching down and sideways, hands in fists near her chest. Thank god for kick-boxing. She had taken it up in case Ellie ever decided to send anyone after her.

He caught her foot in one hand, the impact sending a jolt down her whole body and for a moment, she almost lost her balance. How could he be so inhumanly fast? Looking into his glowing eyes, Tam had never known such fear. Raw, primal emotion that swept her from head to the foot he held casually.

Well, she thought. You just said it. He's not human.

She had hunted vampires...but that had been with guns and knives, surrounded by the rest of her, for want of a better word, friends. She had kept well back, not wanting to hurt these Nightpeople because they couldn't help what they were. They had harmed no one. But she had killed them by doing nothing to help.

Now, she began to see where the Ellie's hatred came from. Fear.

"What on earth is going on?"

X - X - X - X - X

The bell rang, and Rob scraped his books into his bag, trying to blink the exhaustion from his eyes. The lesson had actually been interesting, but he was just so shattered from all this damn vampire hunting. Ellie was obsessive.

He and Tam had tried to get out. Both had woken to find a gun to their head, with Ellie at the other end. The message was clear and short. Even fluffy, sweet Sharla Ferrars got the same treatment, and a furious Benjamin Skykes. He hadn't believed them.

Ben's sister was in hospital right now, holding onto life by the flat beep of a machine. Hit and run. No one knew who or why. Except the four of them. They all knew too much now.

"Working tonight?" a mild voice asked him. He turned to find Chatoya Irkil's green eyes watching him with the serene smile that so often graced her face. He supposed she was a friend, but she was a witch too – and Ellie knew that – so he tried not to talk to her in school.

Rob knew Toya was confused by it sometimes, but he didn't want it to be her he was chasing through the woods. Her whose eyes were filled with the helpless terror of the trapped deer.

"Um, yeah," he said hurriedly, his grey eyes looking anywhere but at her. "Oh, hey, Mal, didn't see you in history!"

Blue Malefici, one of his friends – albeit one who knew nothing about the group hobby because Ellie didn't quite trust him yet – gave a faint smile. "I wasn't there."

"That might be why then," Rob said inanely, wishing Chatoya would go away and stop putting herself at risk. "You going to Ellie's party this weekend?"

The spiky-haired boy raised one eyebrow. "Count me out," Blue said coolly. "I have to watch some paint dry, and then I have an hour or two of intensive observation of a brick wall."

Smart guy, Rob thought silently. Ellie had been planning to induct him into the group fun this weekend. Even though Mal had an aura about him that screamed knowledge, age, something that no teenager should have, he was sure the blue-haired boy wouldn't be prepared for the shock of discovering the Nightworld.

"Think you could take the time to ram your head into it while you're there?" Toya said sweetly, flicking back her black hair. Rob blinked. Had he missed something? He'd never seen Blue and Toya talking, or even arguing.

"What is this life is full of care, we have no time to stop and indulge in self-mutilation?" Blue moved closer to Chatoya. Intimidatingly close. This wasn't like him... Where had the constant smile, the wry comments gone? "Doesn't quite run. But why don't you?"

"From you?"

That was it. This was weird. Rob waved a hand between them, even though both of them were taller than he was, and Chatoya's eyes were smouldering dangerously. "Guys? What is with you?"

The girl's face seemed to tighten until she was the pale colour he had seen her only once before, before she had shown him her magick. "Nothing," she said shortly, and strode away.

"Rob," a sultry voice purred, and a hand appeared on his elbow like a fleshy spider. Rob swallowed his revulsion as he turned to face Ellie Ambler, pouting in dark lipstick and designer drag. "Where's Tam gone?"

"Principal," he said curtly. "Ellie—"

"Tonight, Robert," she hissed, leaning in so he could smell the overwhelming, spicy perfume she wore. "If she's not there, there's trouble. Find her and tell her."

Come to think of it, Tam had been a long time...and he had to find her anyway. Might as well do it now. He couldn't face lunch, and left Ellie scowling behind him, yet knew in truth he was fleeing from her.

X - X - X - X - X

Tam felt a pang of relief at the voice of the principal cut the air. Half twisting her body, she turned a pleading face to the man, whose mouth was agape. "What are you doing?" the man repeated.

Aspen didn't let go. But there was a honeyed lilt to his voice as he said, "Nothing...nothing at all."

Tam could only stare, aghast, as the man's face began to smooth over.

"There's some paperwork in your office you should be doing," Aspen continued. His voice fell on her ears like raw satin, rubbing along her body as if was solid. "You saw nothing...and you'll remember nothing, except that you haven't moved from your chair. You won't until I tell you."

With not a word, the man turned and walked back into his office.

"Now," he said curiously, eyeing her with blatant fascination, "what do I do with you?"

I'm looking death in the face, she thought. And I'm dealing with it. I'm seeing a vampire...and it doesn't surprise me. This is what my life has become.

"Leave me alone," Tam said calmly. She had to be rational. Getting scared excited him. She could see it, the way his mouth had parted a little, eyes becoming heavy with disturbing emotions. "I won't tell anyone."

"I don't give a damn who you tell," he said. His voice was little more than a rasp, honey-coated sandpaper. "They won't care. I don't want your silence."

He tugged on her leg sharply, making pain flare as it bent in ways it wasn't supposed to, and then Tam had lost her balance and was falling, falling...she could only brace herself for the pain. But he moved, and caught her, so she was dipped backwards like the leading paramour of a play, with his face hovering over her neck, his breath tingling on her skin.

This is not...but she stopped herself. It obviously was happening. She was alone. She had no way to tell anyone what was happening. What she wouldn't give for vampire telepathy. For vampire strength.

"You smell so sweet," he said, more a moan than anything.

Oh, god. She was in a hallway with a crazy, hungry and horny vampire.

"I take steroids," she whispered. "I'm brimming with testosterone."

"I don't believe that," he said, voice rich with delight. A hand flexed at her back, stroking her skin. Mental note, Tam told herself, next time, wear plate armour. "But now I'll have to taste for myself and find out."

"Bite me and I'll bite you back," she hissed.

He paused, looking intrigued. "You don't have the strength."

"I get mad when I'm in pain," she said. "And if you bite me, I will be in pain." She already was. Being arched back like this was making her back scream and blood fill her head in painful pounding.

His eyes became dreamy, slipping to her throat. "I'd like that," he sighed. Licked his lips, the hand cupping her head digging into her scalp. His head lowered, her heart thundered.

She could see no way out of this.

His teeth sank into her neck and with them came a shockwave of shimmering diamond energy that shot through Tam's head and hurled her into another world.

_Lately I'm beginning to think that I should be the one behind the wheel._

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you think.


	3. Chapter Three

My thanks to all of you absolute angels who reviewed - I loved hearing what you thought! Thanks: **Starwisher, Tough Fluff, Night Goddess, Persephone, Dark Angel, Me, Myst, Aquilla, Dead Flower, WolfGrrl, Keya, Delphine, Cynical Leaf **and last but never least, **Kittykatt**.

Lyrics come from _Tomorrow Never Dies _by Sheryl Crow.

**Remember Part Three**

_ Fascination's got allure; how you tease, how you leave me to burn..._

The elegance and finery of the court had stunned Ana when she was a child. The ladies had seemed to her like the brilliant birds of paradise that spread their wings and created rainbows. The men were dashing and gallant, and all she ever wanted was for a handsome man to sweep her off her feet.

She got her handsome man.

She remembered the fist time she had been introduced to her comte. She had been fifteen, and by now used to the corset that pinched her waist and levelled her back, used to the heavy skirts and perfectly versed in all aspects of etiquette. Used to the fact she was now a marriageable commodity. She had already been betrothed once, but her intended had died before she had even met him.

And he had been seventeen, and not then a comte, but a boy with cool dark eyes and a poise that no one so young should have, she knew now. The stone had not set so deep in him then; he still smiled and laughed, and except for an odd watchfulness that sometimes flickered in his eyes, was like anyone else.

Then, he was an idol to her, a wistful dream.

He had watched her throughout the meal, staring for an impolitely long amount of time, and saying little.

And afterwards, when she had curtsied graciously, and retired to her rooms at her father's dismissal, she somehow missed the fact that her comte had slid from the room; no one had noticed him leave. But leave he had, for when she entered her rooms, her maid trailing after her, he had been standing in the centre of her room.

Ana stopped. "What are you doing?" she said, scandalised. Even at fifteen, she knew how to draw herself up, and look down her nose at him, though as he was taller, it wasn't terribly effective. "Get out!"

"Demoiselle," her maid had said, her voice puzzled, "Who are you talking to?"

Was the girl blind? "What do you think? That...that man standing in the middle of the floor!"

The girl had backed away, her eyes flicking from side to side. "I can see no one, Demoiselle."

"You'd best send her away," he said quietly. "She can't see me. No one can...except you."

She watched him for a moment. He had been good at guarding his expressions, even then. "Go," she ordered the girl. "I think I will lie down. It has been a strenuous evening."

"Demoiselle," the girl said, scuttling away. No doubt gone to laugh over her mad mistress.

The raw power of his stare froze her still. Moments passed, of a tense and unhurried silence as she looked him over carefully, from the grey eyes that were curious and closed, across the long dark hair that was curling gently, down to the fine clothes and odd contrast of his hands, which were calloused and bronzed.

"You've worked?" she asked, puzzled.

A one-shouldered shrug. "I thought it would be interesting."

"And did you think creeping into my room would be interesting too?" She fixed him with her eyes, a pale green that darkened in joy and bleached in sadness. They were a flushing forest now. "It isn't honourable."

He smiled, but something that surprised her – he ducked his head as he did it, so she couldn't see. As if he was afraid to show it. "You don't know much about the Court, do you?"

"I have been a member of it for four years now," she declared proudly, deciding to put this arrogant boy in his place. "And honour plays a high part."

"In public, perhaps, but behind closed doors...honour gives way before desire," he answered.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about." She hated the uncertainty that slid into her voice. But he was so confident, and so handsome. "Why are you here?"

"I wanted to see if you were as innocent as you act," he said, still not moving an inch. "And you are."

"I am not!" she said, unable to stop the childish reaction. "I've been betrothed."

"To a man you never even saw. He would have hurt you, mon ange."

"I am not your little darling!" she flared up, her eyes glittering furiously. "And I never will be!"

His laugh cracked through the room and fearful someone would hear, Ana glanced at the door. Shut still. When she turned back, he was right in front of her. She yelped and stepped back, tripping over her skirts in her haste, and was only saved from an indignant tumble by his swiftness.

She was aware he should not be holding her, though his touch was dulled by the layers of clothes and corset. Those enigmatic grey eyes should not be quite so close, nor so intense. "Haven't they told you?" he murmured. His mouth looked surprisingly soft, she found herself thinking, and blushed at her thoughts. Ladies didn't think such things... "We are to be betrothed."

"What?"

"Mon ange," he continued, "your family went to see a witch, to see what the future might hold for their angel-voiced one. And your future holds me. As, one hopes, will you."

Her face was opening like a flower as she stared at him. "Truly?"

"We are meant," he answered.

She stood in her grand rooms, and for the first time, she wanted to sing a merry song, to sing a song of love that would not evoke the old lonely ache, but a new, warming we. "Meant?"

He brought his hands up, inches from her face, as if he didn't quite dare touch her. In those eyes, so like smoke wavering behind glass, she saw the miasma begin to draw back until an odd new heat shivered there.

"Vous êtes mon âme," he whispered, as his hands touched her face, and his soul touched hers.

X - X - X - X - X

In another part of the school, the girl who had sat so calmly discussing death was looking up. Not squinting. Not blinking. Her black eyes stared directly at the sun, seeming to suck in and destroy the rays.

"Therese."

The chains in her lobes and her nose flashing bronze as she spun. "Bane. Have you seen Aspen yet?"

"You read my mind," the lamia boy said blandly. Blue Malefici rarely used his first name. It had been given to him by his Redfern side of the family, a side he had made suffer for their treatment of a bastard.

"Not this time. You're harder to get into than _Crime and Punishment_, darling."

The blue eyes tugged at the answering darkness in her soul. Before she met Blue and Aspen, she had never met anyone else who savoured the kill so much, who understood that one could court death, like a lover, and cuckold it at the same time. "My favourite."

"I never saw you for a Dostoyevsky fan."

"We were talking about the book?"

Her black eyes, shiny as olives, leapt with amusement. "Enough chat." Talking with Blue was playing Russian roulette with her life. "We need to discuss the future. This place is perfect for what we want."

"I wouldn't say perfect," the boy murmured, leaning back against the wall and folding his arms. She remembered another time he had done that, when there had been blood turning his hair as shocking violet, and a body at his feet. "But close enough. I tried to reach Martin...and we have a problem, Therese."

"Problem?" she inquired, her voice sharpening like the air before a thunderstorm. The sunstones in her ears flashed a glassy orange. She had the supple, slender build of a reptile, and indeed, a legion of snakeshifters danced in her vampire blood. They were all she fed from.

"Martin's found his soulmate."

Lightning sizzled from her eyes. "They don't exist."

"My sweet spider," he said mildly, a sudden smile making him radiant, "I assure you, they do."

Something rang like a tuning fork on Therese's soul then, and she stared at this calm, cold boy. The certainty was in his eyes, almost tangible, and in his voice. Blue never did anything unless he was certain.

"You..."

"I," he confirmed. "Being launched into someone else's being is rather a shock to one's system. And considering Apsen is about as balanced as a misshapen turnip, I think it's fairly safe to say there may be trouble ahead. Minus the moonlight, love and romance, though we're still going to have to face the music."

"Damn him," she said angrily, tugging the chains at her nose until it hurt. "Who is it?"

"A vermin girl by the name of Tamara Slone," he said with a shrug. "Best leave it a while."

"Knowing Aspen, he'll have his usual reaction to anything he doesn't like. Better hope Ms Slone isn't waiting for him to sweep her up in his arms," Therese drawled, mentally readjusting her plans.

"She'll have to wait until he's got them out of the straitjacket," Blue agreed. Therese watched him, that face with its sharp lines and bladed eyes. She didn't know the sensual curve of his mouth had come from, or that smile that was as sudden as sunlight on a rainy day. "I'll speak to him tomorrow—"

"Vermin alert," she said softly, pursing her lips as a human approached, a tentative smile on his face.

It was that blond boy who seemed to believe Blue was a friend. Rob something. The one with the grey eyes that were too trusting. She wondered idly what he'd taste like...

Maybe she would find out.

X - X - X - X - X

Rob felt his thoughts spinning into the crazy, angry knot he always seemed to tie himself in when he started wondering just how Ellie had managed to hold him and Tam prisoner so long.

Why didn't they just tell someone?

Because he had seen what Ellie could do. She wasn't some senior playing games. She was a killer. Killer. It was a word people threw around, Killer smile. Killer dress sense. Killer whale.

Thief would have been a better word. Because she stole lives. She took other people's existence, snuffed them out like they were candle flames on an altar.

He was glad that at least he'd had Tam through all this. They'd been friends so long now, he thought of her as more than a person. She had become an angel for him, his guardian angel.

It was a little known fact that Rob Slivan, popular, tennis star, basketball star, was an emotional screw-up.

He still had the scars on his wrist. He'd gone for the traditional method, and might have succeeded too if Tam hadn't decided to drop in because she thought he'd seemed a little 'off' that day.

He'd been euphoric. Delighted that he had finally found a way out of his pit of a life that made him someone he didn't want to be, but didn't know any other way to be. And she had known, somehow, and found him passed out on his bed while his parents had gone out to a barbeque, with his hands smothered in blood after she got in with her key. Yeah, she even had a key to his house.

So he'd lived. His parents had hushed everything up, and Rob had explained away the bandages by telling everyone he'd sprained both his wrists playing basketball with Tam.

She was his angel. Sometimes he wondered just why she stuck with him, but loved her for it all the same.

She'd saved him more often than she knew, just with a smile, or a word, or a blink of those dark, humorous eyes. Everyone always thought that saving someone's life had to be some cliffhanger stunt. It wasn't. It was the little things that would pull you back, time and time again, that would make you look outside yourself and see the sun shone on you just like it did everyone else. No more and no less.

"Mal, you seen Tam?" he said lightly. Why Blue Malefici was keeping company with Therese Orage, he didn't know. She didn't seem like Blue's kind of person at all. Too weird and psychotic. And a vampire.

The girl gave a low, throaty chuckle. "Try the principal's office." It might have been Rob's imagination, but he thought he saw Blue shoot the girl a piercing glower. "She's a bit wrapped up at the moment."

As he walked away, he thought he heard someone say, "You mind if I play with that one, Bane?"

Who the hell was Bane? Unless...oh hell, Blue was Nightworld? Time to start panicking. If he could read minds...Rob stopped that thought at once. Trouble. Huge trouble. And as he turned the corner to the principal's office, he saw even more trouble than he wanted to think about.

X - X - X - X - X

Tam stirred slowly, wondering what time it was. Shouldn't she be getting up? Someone was speaking, a shadow leaning over her. She struggled to focus, but finally the sounds cleared into anxious words.

"Vermin girl, wake up! I didn't mean to hurt you...I didn't know what you were. Who you were, or I was, or anything! I didn't know anything! But I know now, please wake up!"

Her neck hurt...touching two fingers to it, she found sticky warmth, and alarmed, pushed herself up, hindered by hands that were trying to help and only managing to annoy. She brought her fingers to her eyes. Scarlet splatters.

"Blood?" she said aloud.

It hit her.

Her eyes flew open, and stared at the pale, dazzling face of Aspen Martin. He was breathing raggedly, hovering close to her as if he wanted to touch her but was too afraid.

He had bitten her.

She punched him.

"Ow!" He leapt backwards like a scalded cat, his eyes locked into a searing orange and a deep, sinking blue. She moved as quickly as she could, feeling strangely light-hearted, following his steps and slamming her hands at his face. "Hey! Quit that! Vermin girl! Don't!"

I am not going to faint, she told herself, a surge of anger making her face heat. I don't let anybody do this to me. She was moving faster than she knew was sensible, motions a mere blur.

And he was blocking her moves, those wild eyes a little more feral with every instant. Only sheer suicidal rage was winning this fight, and when their hands met, fireworks exploded in the depths of her mind.

She wasn't quite sure how it had happened, but suddenly he had stopped blocking and simply stepped into her strike. She wasn't thinking, only feeling, primal and ardent as thunder and lightning made flesh and she had realised that she was fighting him to stop herself doing something else.

Something she did then.

She moved forward, forward, let their mouths meet with a bruising force and a passion she would never have suspected lay inside her. The conformer, the follower.

Her hands caressed his shoulders, and then she was utterly swamped by a far sweeter battle, as the cosmos itself seemed to be reborn in her heart, and reality hit her hard.

She jolted back, terrified. She could feel his thoughts, dear god, his thoughts like a great whirlpool pulling at her, wanting to drag her in and drown her in him.

"It's all right..." He was soothing her, she realised somewhere. She had cut his face where a ring had caught him, and she stared at the wound that was already just a thin red line. "It's all right, sweetling..."

"I am not your sweetling!" Tam said angrily, pushing back, trying to get herself free from his grip. But whenever she prised one hand off, he'd simply resettle it somewhere else. "You bit me!"

"You kissed me," he protested. His hair was disarrayed, and it had been sleek under her fingers.

"When?"

"Hello, about ten seconds ago?"

I did, Tam thought, searching for an answer to that. Oh god. I actually did. She wasn't like this! She was calm, and ordinary. She didn't kick guys and then kiss them. And she certainly didn't get free pyrotechnic displays every time she touched them. "Coincidence. I was...trying something."

"Yeah, trying it on." He gave her a satisfied smirk. "You could just have asked."

She snorted, her dark eyes regaining a little of their poise. "You drank my blood." She had figured it out. "Of course I'm going to be light-headed. I'd have to be."

"You're my soulmate," he stated. The word hung on the air, quivering like a hummingbird.

She gave him her best scornful look, glaring down at him. "No, I'm your victim. There's a difference. Now would you please let me go?"

The strange eyes stared at her. "Don't you know what that means?" he asked urgently. "You're destined for me. You're the other half of my soul."

He was serious. His hands were holding her tight, so tight Tam couldn't move. If anyone turned up, this would be...embarrassing. "Prove it."

"What, the ability to read my mind isn't enough?" he said incredulously. He frowned suddenly. "Something...happened a minute ago. We both blacked out...I remember something. I think."

He had dreamed something too? She watched his face, a face strangely young and flawless. It was different to her now, she realised. It was a face she knew; the fierceness in his eyes, the shark-quick smile, the way his hair fell...she knew it.

"Mon ange," he said suddenly, looking at her. And as he said it, she heard another voice with a soft, rich accent saying it, ringing in her ears. And as clear as if she had walked back into that memory, she heard the same voice. "You are my soul."

Silence hung between them, so all Tam could feel was herself quaking, and the weight of Aspen's eyes on her. "I know," she said finally. "I know."

He let go of her with a sigh, reaching out to run his hands through her hair. "You're mine, you know," he told her softly, the honey in his voice running through her like a wire. "I want this. You're mine to love."

The intensity in his voice frightened her. She was a teenage. Love was for years ahead. Lust was for now. "Look, I don't know what this is, but you can't own me."

"Yes I can," he said simply. His teeth glinted, and he was looking at her with hungry eyes. "Do you know what my life is? Do you know what I have to live with being every day because I can't stop myself?"

She didn't know what he was talking about. "Do you know what mine is?" Tam said angrily. "You're a vampire, Aspen. You're Nightworld."

One hand cracked out and caught her throat, forcing her to stare into his eyes. Tam fought for breath, he was choking her, and his eyes were a wild yellow, hard against a festering green. "You're human. How do you know that? How?"

Her heart was in her mouth; she had no answer, only the truth, which was terrible as he was in that moment.

_It's so deadly, my dear, the power of wanting you near._

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading! Thoughts adored.


	4. Chapter Four

Thank you so much to all the fantastic, cosmic people who took time out to tell me what they thought last time round. Thank you to: **Dead Flower, Persephone, Starwisher, Cath, Myst, Tough Fluff, Night Goddess, Kittykatt, **and last, the fabulous **Cynical Leaf. **

it now, I guess! Thanks – I'm going to need all the luck I can get!)

Comments are adored like a good book; read, savoured, appreciated, adored and cherished.

The lyrics are from Smashing Pumpkins 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' which has been drowning out the neighbours pneumatic drill!

**Remember Part Four**

_Someone will say what is lost can never be saved._

Tam could not believe this was happening. One second ago, Aspen had been proclaiming she was his to love, next minute, he was choking the life out of her. She clawed at his grip, but he was impossibly strong, strong as the roots of a mountain, lack of air sprinkling her vision with dots of black and red.

She was going to define exactly what love meant to him at some point. With a crowbar.

He repeated the question, shaking her with each word until she thought her spine would snap. "How do you know what the Nightworld is?"

How am I supposed to answer the question if you're choking the life out of me? she thought frantically, just as he let go, and her body crumpled. She caught herself, forced her body straight.

"Well?" A cold wind blew in his voice, so beautiful she wanted to crawl to him and beg for forgiveness.

Beg? Even lack of oxygen shouldn't make her this brainless.

She was swaying, and Tam cursed herself for that, concentrating on inhaling and ignoring the jagged edge of pain in her gullet. All her vision could lock on was his eyes, those eyes so unique, glowing the white-blue of a pulsar star and the turgid, smoky red of hell, stark against the ivory luminosity of his skin.

"This is the last time I am going to repeat this," he said flatly. Where was the eager, frightened boy who had been so concerned for her? "How do you know about the Nightworld?"

She couldn't betray the vampire hunters. "Woman's intuition."

"Are you trying to be smart?" Incredulity swelling in his voice. "Do you know what I am?"

"Certifiable?"

His eyes widened and for a moment he did look young and naïve. "I'm not playing with you." He made a motion towards her, and Tam moved back, one hand still rubbing at her aching throat. How the hell was she going to explain away the bruises from this one to Ellie?

That surprised her. She was actually going to try and hide Aspen from Ellie. He was a vampire. Didn't he deserve to be hunted down and killed, scattered across the winds like the dust he came from?

There was an odd plea in his eyes. "Tell me, vermin girl. I don't want to hurt you, but I will. Don't make me like hurting you."

The words caught at her, and she stopped listening to the words themselves and listened to his voice. There was fear in it. Fear and a kind of desire that he couldn't stop. Part of him wanted to hear her scream. That crazy, untameable part that had crushed her throat in his hand and sank his teeth into her.

"What the hell are you?" she asked, hardly aware that the words were falling from her lips like tiny bombs each one, that made him flinch a little. "I've met vampires before, but they haven't been like you. Some of them have been killers, and some of them were ordinary...but none have been both."

He shivered. "Don't."

He was on the defensive now, and Tam pressed her advantage. "Don't what? Why are you so screwed up?" Her voice was hurting and husky, but she made the words clear. The abnormal radiance was gone from his face, leaving him that strange, scared kid.

She was reminded of the dog Rob used to have, a big beagle that padded through the woods with the pair of them when they went sailing on the lake. That beast had gone rabid two years back before anyone knew, and had nearly bitten Rob. So his father had gotten the gun that had never killed anything worse than pheasants and the odd rabbit, and shot the dog. He had hit it, but it hadn't died straight away.

While it lay there dying, all the rabid darkness had drained out of its eyes and left them uncomprehending and wounded, unable to understand why it had been hurt so.

That was what Aspen looked like.

"I am not screwed up!" he shouted, his stained lips drawn back to show his fangs, gleaming with a pearly light, but bespattered with dull red. My life on his teeth, she thought. "There's nothing wrong with me!"

There's everything wrong with you, decided Tam, but didn't say it.

"Now tell me what I want to know." Flat calm in his tones, and his face was pale but composed.

His eyes were dead.

A wave of excruciating pain hit her head, and Tam heard her own breath sawing at the air as she tried to breathe in enough to let out the red-hot screams that were scratching at her. Endless grey and crimson streamers lined with razors ripped through her head, until she didn't know which way was which.

Then the pain turned off, and she heard furious shouting. Open your eyes, she urged herself. Something interesting might be going on.

Something was. Rob had arrived.

X - X - X - X - X

Therese chuckled as the sounds of the fight drifted to her and Blue. The corridor was only a few twists and turns away, and their vampire senses were sharp enough to pick up the sound of someone being thrown across the room. And it wasn't the human boy.

"He's quite feisty, isn't he?" she remarked. "I'm going to have to sample him."

"Will you? Why, exactly?"

The icy smile said he already knew...Blue had always been able to read her mind without difficulty. But he wanted to make Therese admit the truth to herself. She had once told him that she was the most human of them all, and he hadn't stopped laughing for a good hour or so after. And he had never forgotten.

Therese licked her lips with a forked tongue. Her mouth was watering at the thought of how piercingly sweet his blood would be; the human boy had smelled like popcorn mixed with the headiness of a thunderstorm, and she had liked it. "He's too soft. Innocent. He annoys me...he's too human."

He nodded, showing neither approval nor disapproval, then reeled off an address. "You can find him there," he drawled. "The vermin are always there playing pool. They invited me over."

"You won, I assume?"

The smile flashed then, and with it came ferns of silver light creeping into his eyes. "I lost all three games. It's amazing how much more they liked me afterwards."

She stared at him. "Is that how you manage to have so little trouble fitting in here?"

"It's my overwhelmingly likeable personality, my dear spider. And the fact that unlike you and Martin, I'm sane." Therese didn't bother to deny it. He gave the easy, rich laugh that meant nothing but trouble. "I think I will go to their little soiree tonight. I have the feeling they might want to tell me something."

"You caught that too?" In the mind of the human boy, Rob, there had been an underlying thought about his group of friends. Buried, but the sinister fear surrounding it had been enough to make Therese wonder.

"I did." They both paused to listen to a particularly nasty stream of abuse that Aspen was spouting. "Someone should mention to Aspen that certain aspects of that are neither physically nor biologically possible. Besides, the vermin boy knows we're both vampires. Won't it be entertaining to go and see just how much he and his friends know about the Nightworld?"

That viper's tongue flickered at him. "Don't you hurt that human one, Bane. He's my meal."

"Free-range dregs? How quaint. Why don't you come along too? Mix business and pleasure."

X - X - X - X - X

Tam was watching, astonished as a furious Rob actually held his own in this fight. He was a human, and he was managing to hold off a vampire. An angry, crazed vampire who was snarling like that rabid dog had, and who didn't to seem at all averse to using teeth and elbows in this fight.

And there was another problem.

Every time Rob hit Aspen, it doubled her over in pain. She could hardly find time to think as fresh aches blossomed on her face, her stomach, her shoulders, her legs.

Got to get up, she thought determinedly. A part of her was screaming that her soulmate was being hurt, and she had to stop it. It was warring with the part that saw her best friend in danger. She managed eventually.

So far today, she had been bitten, strangled and beaten. She could hear the talkshows calling.

Tam hovered for a moment, breathing through the pain – she was getting good at it – and waiting for them to break apart. When Aspen threw Rob back a foot or two, she stepped between them.

Rob hissed at her, not noticing the blood that trickled onto his eyelashes. "Tam, get out of the way!"

She ignored him, and turned her attention to Aspen. His eyes were almost all white and black, only two rings of violet and leaf-green showing like halos around them, and she could tell he wasn't seeing her anymore, that he was out of control.

But she could feel his mind, that swift, self-contained vortex tugging at her, telling her what he would do.

As Rob gaped, she dodged the blow the vampire aimed at her with a dancer's grace – so easy - and leaned in to put her hand against his face, knowing she would have to endure the next strike to touch him.

He did hit her, but at the same moment, she felt a rip in his mind, and Tam saw herself as he did.

Was she really that unruffled, almost disdainful? She had never seen that her eyes, velvet as soot, held a contentment Aspen couldn't understand, or that the black, crimped hair shimmered like oil against the bronzed skin. And over her face, for a second, she saw another laid – a face that was aristocratic and proud – before the memory slid away, because like her, he could only recall fragments of that odd dream.

All that she saw, while she felt herself drop, landing on her side. For a moment she thought he had fallen too, then realised he had her cradled in his arms, the maelstrom replaced with horror.

"Vermin girl!" he stammered, stroking her face, her hair, shivering himself. He was talking so fast it made no sense at all. "I'm so sorry, please forgive me, I didn't mean to do that, I didn't want to, only I did and you got me so mad, I wish I hadn't hurt you and I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Her head pounded like a pneumatic drill. "Damn right you are," Tam croaked.

Rob was there too, and she knew his first words were going to be laced with threats and abuse. "You—"

"No!" she shouted, sitting up, making her own head ring so much that she collapsed into Aspen's protective hold. His hands curled about her almost furtively, aware that this was against everything he had been taught. Both of the boys shut up, mostly, she suspected, out of sheer surprise.

"Enough. Neither of you know the full story."

"He's a goddamn vampire," Rob spat, the first venom she had ever seen him show. Aspen bared his fangs and snapped them like a cheated crocodile. "We should give him over to...you know."

"Did I just hear that?"

Confused, Rob took a step back as Tam elbowed Aspen until he let go of her and got to her feet, albeit waveringly. "Look at him, Tam! Can't you see what he is? I didn't think I'd ever say this, but he's a monster. For chrissake, look at yourself. You're bleeding all over! And your neck—" Rob stilled, and his voice went dangerously quiet. "Oh my god, the son-of-a-bitch bit you."

Aspen was on his feet, so fast it made her blink. "Don't you call me that! My blood's purer than she is!" He gestured at Tam.

She didn't know whether to laugh or scream. "Would you shut up? Or shall I go away and let you two get on with marking your territory or whatever the hell this is?"

Rob seemed to have fixed on one fact. She took a look at him, and knew that shock had closed down his mind to everything except a rigid structure of denial, disbelief, fury and fixation. "He bit you."

He took one step forward and Tam pushed him back with all her might. It moved him about a millimetre. "No...Rob, you don't understand! Aren't you even going to let me explain?"

He took a deep breath. "Guess I owe you that."

"He did bite me," Tam said evenly, trying to get the message into Rob's suddenly exceptionally thick skull. "And yeah...I didn't like it. It was like rape, I guess. But then something weird happened. This is going to sound really bizarre...in fact," she added to Aspen, "maybe you'd better tell it."

She glanced at the vampire's face and saw that chilling vulnerability there, coupled with the demented fear. She knew he wouldn't be saying anything; he couldn't. Those eyes were looking at her like she was the only thing that could save him now. He was shuddering, and surprising herself, Tam approached him.

His breath rasped in her ears, and those hopeless, trapped eyes stared at her. God, what had someone done to make him like this?

She put a hand on his arm, and he flinched, turning his head and closing his eyes as if he had expected her to hit him. Tam waited a moment, felt him still, and turn to her slowly, eyelids lifting open, peering at her from under his eyelashes. Then she let her hand move up his arm, the soul-link dim and misty.

Across his shoulder, firm and still quivering, up the curve of his collarbone, now with a trail of diamond sparks lighting her mind, and over that clenched jaw to where his mouth trembled.

Tam didn't understand this power he had over her, simply by being. The mute appeal in that flinch had called out to her, because it was a reaction she recognised.

She didn't say anything, but looked up into the dilated eyes, and let her hand drift through his already mussed hair, running her finger along one of those blond streaks. It was touch he needed, she somehow knew. Simple human contact, like a hurt kid, to let him know that here was someone to take comfort from.

Even so, she was startled when he moved with that supple ease she admired so, and simply flung his arms around her, burying his head in her neck. It sent a pang through her, the desperate way he clung to her.

It wasn't because it was her, she understood, stroking the back of his neck and wondering what on earth Rob was making of this without caring how disgusted he was. The vampire just needed someone to hold. If it had been anyone (except possibly Rob), he would have done the same. She could feel his breath, warm and humid on her neck, making the place he had bitten tingle.

He lifted his head to nuzzle her cheek, those tormented eyes making her sorry – sorry! – that she had yelled at him. And now she wished that the wildness would come back and cover up this horrible secret that lurked in his soul, that he had been shredded into pieces held together only by pretence and illusion.

Let him be angry, and cruel, and uncontrolled, if it would make him forget.

His lips moved, saying words that were almost a mantra. Vous êtes mon âme. And from the way he shyly kissed her on the cheek with a chasteness that was completely opposite to the way he had kissed her before, and the awe, the wonder in his eyes, she knew that he meant it.

It made her forget the bruises, the aches, the anger.

"Um...are you two done re-enacting 'The Lion King', or do I have to wait for a rendition of 'Can You Feel The Love Tonight'?" The hesitant voice cut into that startling intimacy, making his pupils shrink, and the screen roll over them. "And...you don't need to explain. I get it." Rob sounded distinctly uncomfortable.

She raised her eyebrows at Aspen. He let her go, some of the old confidence coming back in the delighted curve of his mouth, with his pain once again concealed.

"Anyway..." continued Rob doggedly, despite his cut forehead, the blood turning his bronze hair a clammy brown, and despite what had to be a fairly serious case of concussion, not to mention the severe trauma he had just experienced, "I did have a reason for finding you."

"Shoot," Tam said. She could live with her new husky voice. Explaining it would be a problem. Still, if she could just avoid Ellie—

"We have to go to that party tonight."

What party? She actually jumped at Aspen's voice. Only this wasn't a voice. It was more texture than anything; the same feeling as silky water easing down her hair, water charged with electricity. Rob was giving her a frankly startled look.

Great. Caught between a jock and a hardcase. "Oh...god."

"And if you and him are really..." It took Rob three tries to get the word out. "Together, then we have to start finding some reasons why you look like an extra for ER."

What party? Aspen said, louder. He snaked an arm round her waist, if somewhat hesitantly, and pulled her closer so he could whisper in her ear. "I'm not good at secrets."

"Well, I'm giving you some practise," she whispered back. "This isn't your business."

I'm your soulmate! he snapped, reverting to telepathy so he could shout. You are my business.

Are you going to threaten me again?

Vermin girl—

Tam forcibly removed his arm. "It's Tamara, okay? And keep out of it, or this is the last you'll see of me."

Briefly, the shield slipped from his eyes and she wished she hadn't said that. "I understand...Tamara."

"Good." She left him standing there, and treading on Rob's foot as she went past (it was her way of telling him he'd messed up), went to find somewhere to clean up, and start discussing lies. "Rob, are you coming or not? We need to talk about Ellie."

"You bet we do," she heard Rob mutter. Neither noticed the pair of people climbing through the window behind them.

X - X - X - X - X

"Well," purred Therese as she fit her flexible, and in Aspen's opinion, disgustingly emaciated body through the window with spidery smoothness. Blue was dusting off his hands, and looking disarmingly harmless. "You seem quite taken with her. Have you finally found your dushka?"

"Shut up, you damn arachnid," he snapped, as he watched his human - was she his dushka, his dear heart? – walk away with that bloody vermin boy at her side. "I don't know why you're looking so smug."

"Because," she said in a sing-song voice, "we're going to crash their little party."

Aspen felt his heart skip a beat, before a growing glee overcame the fear he had tried so hard to push away. A fear that had only been drowned by the warmth of her arms. She...Tamara...hadn't been afraid of him.

He had never known that.

"Are you in or out?" Blue said, sounding uninterested. "There's something those would-be anarchists are hiding, and I think the pair of you will be interested when you find out what it is."

"How do you know?" Therese said, turning void eyes on him. But there was respect in her stance.

"I can make an educated guess," Blue murmured, and for all the other two knew, he was lying through those wicked teeth. Or maybe he was just guessing. "What they're hiding...well, it's rather vexing. So we thought we'd have a murder-mystery evening. Meal inclusive."

"What's the mystery, Mal?" he asked, recognising the fidgety movements of Therese's hands that meant she was excited.

"How many humans can you kill in a night?" The cobalt eyes glinted. "In or out?"

She would be there. If Blue or Telerana got hold of her... He grinned savagely. "In. Very, very in."

_Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage._

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading!


	5. Chapter Five

Thank you so much to all the spectacular, summery sweethearts of you who reviewed last time round :-) I loved knowing what you thought, and thank you all for your patience! Thanks: **Persephone, Tough Fluff, Starwisher, Myst, Dead Flower, Aquilla, Me, Kittykatt, Dark Angel, Diomede, Jen, **and the fantastic **Fin.**

Comments and criticism would be worshipped like sunlight, songs and summer.

The lyrics are from Planet Perfecto's 'Bullet in the Gun'..

**Remember Part Five**

_There's a bullet in the gun; there's a fire in your heart  
You will move all mountains that stand in the way._

"Ouch!" Tam moved uneasily, glaring at Rob. If it wasn't enough that they'd had to climb in through his window in case his mother saw them, whatever the hell he was using on her cuts, it stung, though his hands were gentle. "Look, what exactly is this supposed to do? Apart from itch like hell."

Rob looked amused, his grey eyes with that playful glitter in them. "Look in the mirror."

She picked her way over the rubbish all over his floor to the mirror. "Do you ever clean—" She stopped.

The cuts were gone, like they had never been there. She tapped a finger on the side of her neck. Flawless skin. No sign of fang-marks, no ring of bruises where Aspen had nearly choked her, not even a tingle.

"What is that stuff/" she said in awe.

Her friend grinned. "A witch made it for me. Toya Irkil – works at the Blood-Rose Café at weekends?"

"She's a witch?" Tam knew the tall girl, whose hair fell like a sheet of frozen ink, but she hadn't even suspected she was a witch. A Wiccan, maybe, with those silver pentagrams that so often glittered in her ears, or a Goth, but not a witch.

"A damn good one." He laughed at her surprise. "You really didn't know?"

"I really didn't know." She waded back through the junk. "That's it, Robert Slivan, I'm going to make you spring-clean this missile-testing site and I don't care if it means genocide for innocent bacteria. But..." She sighed, glancing at her watch. "It's going to have to be after this party. I have to go home and get changed."

Party. What a farce. Ellie's parties were an excuse for her to invite new groups of people and see whether there was anything suspiciously supernatural about them. And to arrange the next hunt.

"Fine, but if you want to clean this, don't expect help," he demurred. "See you at seven."

X - X - X - X - X

"Well, don't we look nice," remarked Therese dispassionately as the trio met just outside the vermin party. Sunset cast hellish shadows across the predatory faces. "I feel like the opening act of Macbeth – and when shall we three meet again?"

In her eyes, Aspen could not see his own reflection, or the light of the sun. Some people believed mirrors stole your soul. He believed that Therese was a living mirror.

"Why, when the battle's done and won," Blue said dryly. "You look ravishing, my dear spider."

She had gone for a soft silvery top that looked like velvet, cut low, chopped off at her midriff and matched with a darker pair of trousers that flared out at the bottom. On her feet...Aspen stared...were five inch heels.

"Therese," he said slowly, "I thought you were planning on hunting tonight?"

"I am, Aspen," she purred, pouting black-painted lips. "But they're hardly going to let us in if we look like a bunch of slobs." Her pointed ebony glance swept him, taking in the navy combats, faded sneakers and snug white top.

Blue shrugged. He was in a tight ripped azure T-shirt that showed glimpses of his torso and black, white and blue trousers in a camouflage pattern. His feet were bare. "They're going to be hammered, my dear spider. By now, they'd let America's most wanted in. And who said we were going via the front door?"

"Hammered?" she repeated with a raise of her eyebrows, plucked into one razor thin line. "I didn't know we were taking weapons."

Aspen's voice was filled with mischief. It always delighted him to know something Therese didn't. "Hammered. Out of their tree. Off their trolley. Drunk. You know what vermin are like with alcohol."

Her thin mouth curled. "They have so little restraint. Remember, the vermin boy's mine."

"All of them?" he said. "Greedy of you, Therese. Share and share alike..."

"Not all of them," she corrected, bringing a compact out from the depths of the top – how anything could fit down there, he didn't know. She flipped it open and dabbed her finger in it, then brushed powder over her eyelids, turning them soot black. "Just one...the blond one that your vermin girl runs with."

"He's all yours," Aspen said shortly, rubbing at a nearly-faded bruise. "I hope you tear his throat out."

"Shall we go, then?" Blue inquired. His eyes were dark and hooded, death to any vermin who looked into them tonight. Aspen couldn't shake the feeling that since he'd seen Blue three years back he had become more powerful than he had any right to be. "Try not to cause any more trouble than you can help...I'd like to at least find out what they're up to before we start killing."

They slid down towards the waiting cattlemarket of vermin. A tune floated into Aspen's head, and it reverberated through the darkness as he hummed it.

_ "Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be..."_

X - X - X - X - X

"You took your time," Eleanor Saxoine murmured dangerously as they walked in, Tam in her crimson dress feeling like a rag to a bull. Music was pounding through the house, and half the high school was there, either high, drunk, dancing or a combination of the three. And Ellie, as ever, looked stunning.

She looked like – and indeed, was – a model, with a sultry smile and layered chestnut hair that always seem to fall perfectly into place, unlike Tam who had to spend twenty minutes of every morning pouring detangler into her wavy hair. But her brown eyes always held a venom that made Tam want to shrink back.

"I've found the perfect hunt tomorrow," she purred, scooping up three bottles of lager and passing two to Rob and Tam. She stopped and spun, putting a manicured hand on her hip. Her eyes stared into Tam and for a moment, she saw something that disturbed her. Pure black hatred. "It's something else."

"We're looking forward to it," Rob said brightly, pasting a smile on his face. "Hope it's better than the last one. I'm dying for a good hunt."

She ran a hand up his arm and Tam saw the quiver of revulsion he couldn't quite hide. "Oh, Rob...you're going to love this one... Meeting in the study in ten minutes." With a sly glance back, she swanned off.

Tam let out her breath in a shaky gasp. "What is up with her tonight?"

"That was weird," Rob agreed. Both of them put the bottles she had given them down on a table. "I think we need to be sober tonight. I don't like this at all."

X - X - X - X - X

"They've got some sort of get-together in the study," stated Aspen. His head was tilted on one side, the blond streaks turned hot orange in the sunset. "She's...worried." And afraid, but he didn't say that aloud.

"Excellent," Therese said, flashing a discreet amount of fang. Her earrings, he noticed, were a pair of serpent's teeth. He'd only seen them twice before, and it meant she was in a killing mood.

"Cue the evil cackle," Blue murmured. "Do you know where the study is?"

Aspen dipped into his soulmate's mind again. He had to do it carefully; Tamara's thoughts were a meadow of crocus fires, sudden and lovely and sensitive. He didn't want her to sense him, and he dared not stay too long in this bewitching place. "Yeah. There's a door, a window and a skylight. One of us at each exit?"

"Skylight's mine, I think," Blue declared. Aspen knew the lamia did mountain climbing...the crazy way. No safety harness, no partner – just Blue, his hands and feet and a few thousand metres of sheer rockface.

"Window," said Therese. "I'm not going through a mess of drunken, vomiting mortals to get to my prey."

"Done." The scene was oddly reminiscent of something he'd seen once. "Follow me, loyal sidekicks."

He yelped as Therese booted him in the knee. "What was that?"

A smile, cool as the curve of the crescent moon, turned up Blue's mouth. "A side kick, of course."

Aspen bared his teeth. "Try it again and you'll be eating your food through a straw."

There was a deadly silence. Threatening them wasn't wise, but he didn't give a damn. He could use some pain. It made everything easier...you couldn't worry about anything except when the pain would stop.

"I usually do anyway," was all Blue said, but under the light, his eyes had mutated with power, turning an inhuman silver-blue, and two pearled fangs slid between that proud mouth. Aspen looked at Therese and saw her pupils were black and cavernous, and her forked tongue flicked between her canines. "Ready?"

They had been in this situation so often. The three of them, against the world and everyone in it. Aspen beamed. He'd forgotten the good times...the music of screams, soaked in the blood of others, drinking in power with every breath.

"Oh yes."

X - X - X - X - X

Tam couldn't shake the feeling she was being watched. It niggled at her, making the hairs stand on the back of her neck. But she didn't dare look around in case Ellie noticed.

They were all there; the score or so that were the in-crowd. In nothing but trouble, as far as Tam could see.

Of all the people in the room, she and Rob were the only ones who didn't want to be here. The rest of them loved it. The guys got to be the heroes, while some of the girls got to jump about pouting and pretend to be Buffy. They saw vampires, shapeshifters and werewolves as nothing more than prey, nothing more than animals.

Sometimes Tam thought that there were monsters in human form than the Nightworld could ever produce.

The scene was surreal. Twenty people, dressed for a party. Holding bottles, and under their clothes, weapons. Low dresses, designer trousers and shirts, strappy shoes, combined with metal and wood. The smell of aftershave, perfume and make-up mixing with sweat and alcohol.

"You're going to love this one!" Ellie called out gleefully, and people shut up. She smirked and flung open a cabinet. New firepower, hand guns and rifles. Some of this had definitely come off the black market.

"New kit...and new prey. I've found us some more vamps...and these ones are dangerous!"

"They're all dangerous," someone called. "We're not here to hunt rabbits, Ellie!"

"No," she agreed smugly. "We're here to hunt vampires...and we've executed twenty of them now – one each! So I thought I'd make this one a celebration. There's three of them, and they're powerful."

"We know 'em?" a girl called. God, Tam thought. Please don't let me know them.

Ellie pulled a firearm out. It was a handgun, shiny and black and harmless. She loaded it and put the safety on, as intent on playing the drama queen as ever. Her voice was muted, so Tam had to strain to catch it. As people moved closer, leaned forward, she had a sudden sense of wrongness. Something was out of place...

There was a shadow falling across the skylight.

She didn't dare look up, but let her eyes subtly swing sideways to the window. She caught a flash of gold and black before there was only the garden vista. Two exits blocked...only two?

She let her gaze slide back the other way, to the door that should have been shut firmly. But it was open, and there was a shape pressed close. A shape with three blond streaks catching white highlights, and a face that was watching her. Eyes filled with disbelief, and worse, betrayal.

No...

"Therese Orage," Ellie announced. Nodding of heads; no surprises there. "Aspen Martin." One or two raised eyebrows. "And the third one...well, you all know him—"

Glass exploded into the room.

X - X - X - X - X

She heard Ellie shriek while humans dived for weapons or cover, depending on how many braincells they had left, as the skylight shattered with a sound like discordant windchimes. Among the glittering shards of glass raining down, a lean boy dropped to land lithely on his feet.

Blue flashed a bright, predator's grin at the horde and dusted chips of glass from his tousled azure hair. "Hi. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Blue Malefici. I could use a good slay – volunteers?"

Ellie stared. "How are you here?" she managed to get out, her hand inching back towards the weapons.

"Inbreeding would be my guess," Rob muttered.

The vampire turned to pin her friend with a liquid, immortal blue stare. "Wrong side of the family." As Ellie's fingers closed on a gun, it flipped into the air, and straight into Blue's grasp. "Ah-ah...very precocious, my dear. By the way, burying one's victims is always a good idea. To ensure they remain dead if nothing else. Dismembered limbs lying about so carelessly always make me less inclined to suspect suicide or spontaneous combustion. And the only cause of freak amputation round here is me."

A gesture of his hands, and metal groaned...the twisted lump that had been the gun thudded to the floor.

The window smashed shrilly, and Therese slithered in, her body undulating like a charmed snake. Her eyes were heavy with hunger, her shiny black lips parting to show white fangs...and she was looking at Rob.

"I'm going to drown in you," she said huskily. "Hold still."

"Bite me," Rob spat, promptly realising his mistake. "Hell, no, I don't mean that."

Tam was ignoring them though; she had turned a sallow face to the door that she was half-expecting Aspen to fling open. But then she met his eyes, one a pure, sweet silver and the other a glittering diamond.

She thought lightning flashed in them, splitting his soul open and baring it to her whether he wanted it or not. And she felt, truly felt, his shock, his anguish before he turned and fled.

Oh god...she followed without a thought, ripping through the crowd, thrusting open the door and kicking off her impractical shoes to dash barefoot through the house, cursing and half-hopping as she trod on a bottle-cap some moron had left lying around.

He was fleet as a hare, parting the crowds easily. Yet she kept on chasing, desperate.

He could take his body away from her, but his soul was trapped. Tam reached out in a way that was solely instinct and called to him to stop, please stop and wait. Behind her, she heard screams and shouts, crashes of glass. She didn't care. The world could burn, and she would run through its embers to find him.

Outside now, into the syrupy sunset light, stumbling on the thistles and rocks that littered the garden.

Losing him...

"Vous êtes mon âme!" she screamed to the bruised sky, praying he would hear. On her knees, gasping in the dirt. The ground was gritty under her palms, and still warm from the smothering heat of the day.

He had stopped. She sensed it. He had stopped, but he wouldn't come back to her, because he was only a writhing mass of betrayal and hurt now. The half-healed wounds in him had split open, and he could do nothing but stand and ache as whatever haunted him howled through his damaged soul.

She got up, wincing at the pain in her feet, with her dress dirtied and creased and her styled hair falling down in tumbling masses. Like Red Riding Hood, she went to meet her wolf, her monster, hers.

He was leaning against a cherry tree, his back to her, alone under the thick canopy of green leaves. One hand rested on the trunk, one was over his eyes.

"Aspen," she implored softly, a lump in her throat hurting for him. "It's not what it seems."

He turned, and looking into his eyes, helpless and swimming in darkness, she thought: he is dead. The world is a ghost to him. He has only his pain and the cause of his pain.

"So you're the killers," he said, his voice low and taut. His mouth was stretched in a dreadful, circus grin, gaping like a wound. "Did you like it? Were you looking at me and wondering what I'd look like running?"

"No." It flew past the cracking madness in his eyes.

"Must have been a shock for all those idiots you killed. Pretty girl like you, hunting us big tough bastards." She saw his eyes break open, and poisonous hell came spilling out. "How could you? You were meant to save me! You were supposed to be good and pure and everything I'm not!"

She could scarcely believe it. This eerie, insane boy still believed in fairytales.

"I'm not one of them," she insisted. She had experienced Aspen in a way that was beyond physical; she knew how silk felt under his touch, and what the colour yellow meant to him, and how the intoxicating elixir of blood tasted, yes, she had experienced him...but she didn't know him.

He flung the words at her dully. "You have betrayed me." Then those bright burning eyes fell shut and he pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. "Why don't you just kill me here? It'd be easier. It wouldn't hurt that way. You...you have hurt me more than anyone ever has."

"Have I really?" she asked gently. It hurt to have someone tell her that. But she knew it wasn't true, and knew she could prove that to him, if only he would let her. If he would leave the spinning, destructive whirlpool of his mind, he would see that.

"Part of me says no, that people have done worse to me than this." He laughed bitterly. "But then I realise that they never gave me hope."

How could he survive without hope? What was made him wake each morning, and sleep each night?

"No one ever touched me like you did," he continued. His voice was calm, but it was the patient silence that lay over a battlefield, a silence drenched in emptiness and carnage. "I thought...it would be different this time. That maybe you'd want me. But I guess all you wanted me for was your hunt."

Still he wouldn't look at her, simply hiding his eyes from her. Half his face was cast in shadow, moulded to the darkness. And the other half was bleak and beautiful. She walked to him silently, on her battered feet.

Somewhere, this had happened before, this invasion of self and soul. She could feel the bond, wanting to join them if only he would let it. She reached out, and ran her fingertips down his cheekbone, then nudged his hand from his face, until she was staring at him, into those terrified and vulnerable eyes.

His lips were parted, breath coming fast. But it wasn't her he feared, Tam understood that. She stood there, a scarecrow of the girl who had walked in and not even caring how she looked. She raised her hands and cupped his face.

"You don't have to be afraid of me," she told him. "Of all of them...I won't hurt you."

His mental voice filled her senses, nightmares rattling behind it. Of all of them...I can't stop you.

"But I won't," she whispered, standing on her toes so she could meet his eyes squarely and watch as a new emotion crept in, one that caused regret to rise in her throat like the jab of a fishhook. It was longing, a longing so powerful that it made him want to curl up and hide from it.

She seemed to see another person laid over his form for a moment, tall and proud. And she remembered the words that had been spoken as if recalling the lyrics of a long-forgotten song, falling from her lips.

"Laissez-moi toucher votre coeur caché."

It reached him, reached through time to the immortal part of him that had always been hers. Slowly, he inhaled, then touchingly hesitant, he lowered his mouth to hers, until they were almost meeting and the aurora borealis danced behind her eyelids.

"Yes," he sighed softly, present blurring into past as words dissolved into a far sweeter language.

_Until the end of all time, I'll be by your side.  
Always dream that I'm yours and I'll dream you're mine._

X - X - X - X - X

Comments would be absolutely adored – thank you for reading!


	6. Chapter Six

Firstly, I'm sorry about the time this has taken! Secondly, and most importantly, thanks to all of you who commented last time round! Thank you - you made the week a joyous one!

Thank you to: **Aquilla, Myst, Persephone, Angelic Angel, Linnet Jo, Dead Flower, Tough Fluff, Cynical Leaf, Kitty Katt, Jen, Starwisher, Gwenseth, **and the divine **Dark Angel**.

As might be a tad obvious, I absolutely adore, cherish and revere comments like I do chocolate, sunlight, summer and F1 - please tell me what you think; I love hearing, both goods and bads.

The lyrics come from Fiona Apple's 'Never is a Promise' which is a beautiful, bluesy song. Hope you enjoy!

**Remember Part Six**

_You said you'd never let me fall from hopes so high._

The study was in chaos. And Rob was not in a good mood.

There was a girl crying on the floor. He pulled her up and pushed her in the direction of the door, glancing round to see if there was anyone else not running for their life. No. Good. Time to get out of here-

"Ohhhhh," a husky voice said slowly, "you're so chivalrous."

Therese was in front of him, tall and menacing. Her black mouth seemed swollen on her face, somehow wrong. She wasn't smiling, and her eyes were fixed on him with an intense craving.

She licked her lips.

Oh no, he had not come here just to get some girl attached to his neck. Especially not Therese Orage, who was to sanity what the Monkees were to the Beatles. Not even close.

"Get lost, Therese," he snapped in the tones of the terminally confident. After all, he reasoned, there was easier prey than him around. "You've ruined the party, okay, now go."

"Darling, darling," she sighed, shaking her head. He wondered absently what colour her hair had been, if it had been as dark as those eyes, as bewitchingly soft. "I'm not here for the party. And neither are you."

"Really?" he said brightly. "What gave me away? Was it the high-powered weaponry? The revelation of the master-plan? The proverbial neon sign that said 'helpless prisoner of loopy model'?"

Her face blazed with zeal. "There are weapons?" Damn.

"Excuse me," he said, edging past her. "I have to go and give a monkey the key to the banana plantation."

He was aware the room was emptying around him as people found the exits. Ellie was gone. First in the room; first out of it too, damn her. He made a mental note to buy himself a cattle-prod very soon.

He almost got to the door, last in the crowd of people shrieking their way into the great beyond.

Next thing he knew, he was flying across the room.

Pity the wall was in the way. Rob hit it with an almighty thump that knocked his breath away, and made the world split into harsh rainbows, his head pounding like someone was playing pinball with his skull.

Unfortunately, when his vision cleared, Therese was above him.

Her eyes were burning.

It was at that point Rob realised he was in more trouble than just a hungry vampire. She could have chosen one of the other tail-enders. But she'd chosen him. Lucky, lucky him.

"Oh, no, no," she purred. "I hope you're not trying to escape."

"Not at all," Rob assured her. "I was just going to shut the door so you could tear my throat out in peace."

"In pieces," she said absently. "I could never get it out in one chunk. Blue's more skilled at that. You're keen to die." Her smile was heart-stopping, appealing as a kitten chasing its tail. "I like that in a man."

"So do I," he said wildly. Sarcasm obviously didn't work with her.

She blinked. "What?"

Perfect. He gave her the widest, most manic smile he could muster, scrambling to his feet. "Sorry, but I don't think you have the qualities I'm looking for in Mr Right. So not interested."

The dark eyelashes lowered slowly, veiling her eyes. "I don't care. I like a challenge. You'll be my human slave...I'll make you beg and plead just to be near me...you'll love me."

"Did you have a traumatic childhood?" he said, watching her with a dreadful fascination. He had never seen anything so deadly, or so truly beautiful. It made his heart ache just to look at her.

Creatures like this were what had been missing. She filled an empty hole inside of him, a part of him that sometimes woke up in the night and wondered what prowled under the blind and secret moon, that knew the horror stories were true, that whispered that there was something else out there somewhere, something that would have all the answers to the questions that made his life so confused and unbearable.

Here she was. And god, he thought that he'd never seen anything so enticingly predatory. His fear had curled up like a dying spider, and left this strange void.

Her stare told him he should submit. Her every word told him that he was nothing to her splendour.

His own thoughts told him she was right.

She was beautiful, and she pulled at the part of him that ached for perfection, but even so...he didn't want to die. Or he didn't think he did. Or maybe he didn't think he should.

He didn't know anymore.

She had a smoky laugh, and that willow-branch of a body swayed backwards and forwards. "You might want to try Aspen if you're looking for that. I didn't come here to listen to your questions."

"What did you come here for?"

She wriggled like a cat in the sun. Rob knew no one should be able to move like that, as though every bone she had had dissolved into heavy ribbon. "You."

You really do walk into these things, the tiny voice that he thought of as his inner adult said.

"What the hell do you want with me?" he said curiously, genuinely confused. Rob couldn't imagine why anyone, even a vampire, would want him. He simply didn't see what others saw when they looked at him.

His life, Rob decided, was lacking something. About six bodyguards for starters.

"You smell...nice."

You had to be normal, the voice nagged. You couldn't have had a socially disfiguring hygiene problem.

He didn't know whether to move or stay still. Staying still meant being too close to her famished eyes, and those slick, wicked teeth. But moving meant tempting her. "So did half the room."

"Not like you." Her hawkish face held him, exotic yet familiar. "You smell like storms and sweetness."

So the Lynx effect really did work. "I don't really see that as a good reason to kill me. I mean, no offence, but I'd like to at least die for a good reason. Old age would be tops."

She was drooling.

"Okay," he said cautiously. "Do you know that that is incredibly unsanitary, never mind disgusting?"

"I don't like my food to talk," she said, gliding forward. Her head swayed back and forth, and there was a strange blankness in her expression. I really don't want to die, Rob realised. Not like this.

"Maybe you should switch to inorganic food then. Much more healthy, I hear. And free of those nasty gristly bits." Rob was backed up against the wall, and her gliding steps would bring her within touching distance soon. "Did I mention that I'm actually an android?"

"No..." she said vaguely. "You're going to taste so good..."

Way too close now...he was flat against the wall, feeling his eyes widen until the cold air brushed them, every muscle gone taut and painful. "I gave blood two months ago!" he yelled. "My doctor said I should wait another four months!"

"Screw your doctor," she said lazily.

"I don't think the Hippocratic oath covers that one," he muttered.

That soft, smoky laugh rolled around his ears again, and she was tipping up his head. Rob tried to duck his head, keep his veins protected but there was too much strength in her. Those black eyes were filled with ancient promise, glistening like mica in coal. "Stop fighting. I can make this feel very good."

"By going far away?"

She licked his throat...and oh god, she had a forked tongue. Rob was paralysed for a moment before he brought one hand round in a no-holds-barred punch.

There was the cold sound of flesh meeting flesh as she caught his arm in one hand then wrenched it at an angle that would have made his trigonometry teacher's eyes water. Rob screamed a word that caused pulses of seashell radiance to writhe in her eyes.

"Later, darling," she promised, and bit him.

X - X - X - X - X

Once:

He loved her, of course.

It was a secret that the comte had buried deep within his heart. It was one that stung at him often, making the mask of coldness and composure he showed to her ever more difficult.

He loved her, but he would lose her.

The witch had been certain of that. He remembered the murky colour of her eyes, thick as a quagmire, and the way she had stared before the click-clickety-click of her knitting needles had clattered on the air.

"You've had lives before this one, you know," she had remarked, quite casually. He had understood why his parents revered her so; ancient and ugly and withered though she was, she was far more clever than he would ever be. Clever, and perhaps a fraction cruel. They had sent him to her to see his future. "With her."

"I have?" he said, fighting to hide his astonishment.

"Of course, mon enfant. But you have failed her every life. And this one won't be any different!" A laugh of glee. "There's another, you see."

It felt as though the guillotine had hissed on his head. "Another?" he had sputtered. "She's betrayed me?"

The witch had laughed, and the clack of the needles had ceased briefly. "Who knows? If she hasn't yet, she will. It's been that way since time begun. You have lost your soulmate to darkness."

His heart was ice, numb with shock. It helped him to calm himself, tell himself she was only an unsightly crone who had nothing to do but toy with others, reading fortunes for a pittance. "How?"

"Because the darkness understands her," she said, her voice as clear and chiming as the rest of her was not. "It will coax her and lure her, and speak softly to her where you turn away. She'll betray you, mon enfant, and maybe she already has. And until you understand her, and give her yourself, she'll walk into the darkness's arms and be glad of its comfort until the moment when it tears her apart."

"I have given her myself," he said guardedly.

She snorted. "No, you haven't. She's given you everything that she is and what have you given her? Trois fois rien. Nothing. You say sweet words, I'm sure, and bestow sweeter kisses, and maybe more, as all men do, but you hide the secrets of yourself from her."

He had left there in a blinding fury that had chilled into this numb ice. If she would betray him, then he would not show by word or deed that he cared. She deserved none of him, and he wanted none of her.

He had told himself.

He saw now that he had driven her into the arms of that Other. He had seen the way the Court whispered about him, and how they looked on her with fondness as she became bright and lovely again, and as he became ever more miserable.

He had given her a choice.

And that day in the maze, she had made it at last, after days of dithering, of piteous tears and soft pleas. He was not immune to them, far from it. She had crushed his heart and trampled upon the pieces.

"I am a bird in a gilded cage!" she had shouted in the privacy of her rooms. "It may be pretty, but it is still a prison! Why will you not smile? Why will you say nothing? I refuse to believe love can disappear."

"You believe it can be born with one glance," he had said in the cool tones he had to use to stop himself losing his temper. "Why can it not die with one?"

He had only himself to blame.

But still, it had hurt. What he had done had hurt.

She had chosen the Other. He had watched her walk the path of darkness, darkness that wooed her with velvety voice and voracious eyes.

The Other had looked at him or a moment, and behind the cool blue eyes, a black hatred had squeezed out to pierce him once, before disappearing. Afterwards, he wondered if he imagined the loathing.

She had chosen the Other. She had chosen death.

He remembered his own words. So empty, and cold, and if only she had known, filled with all the hurt he would never express. "Death, I think, will become you."

He had gestured to the guard, and the light had gleamed an icy blue from the axe.

And the guard had raised the axe, and stepped towards his lady love. Had given her the blade, and those lovely eyes, so innocent and fresh, had widened. The soldiers had left; only the three of them remained.

"Strike off my head," he had said flatly. "It would be easier than watching you dance to your own death."

She had given a little cry, and let the weapon clang to the floor.

The Other had turned those slow, cold eyes on him. "You are cruel, lord."

"You are fortunate," he had said stiffly, and left. He mourned silently for her loss, and waited out the days. It became harder to be merciful within his province; he found that he hated the faces of the pretty girls in his home for now and again, one would tilt her head or laugh like Ana, and he would dream of her.

He had not long to wait.

X - X - X - X - X

The world swept around Tam like wings unfolding.

"What was that?" she asked, feeling more confused than ever. Already the memory was fading away, cleaving into pieces of words and thoughts that made no sense. She stroked Aspen's hair completely absently, loving how kitten-soft it was, and the careful, close way he was holding her.

Aspen blinked, his strange eyes focusing on her slowly. "It was...I don't know. I can't remember."

She opened her mouth to remind him, but the details were already vague and hazy. She only knew that there had been sadness, and betrayal, and intense, awful isolation that she couldn't even grasp.

"I guess it doesn't matter," she said contentedly, shrugging.

The shy, startling smile made her heart melt into a sizzling puddle. "Maybe not...but what you did matters." He paused and the words came out, she thought, as though they tasted strange. "Thank you."

"It was my pleasure," she said, pleased with the way she was handling this.

See, no nasty bite-marks, no tantrums from either side, no one running in and shanghaiing them. Just two normal people, having a perfectly rational conversation, in a garden, in the middle of a party...that had not been merely crashed, but totalled, taken to the scrap yard and made into a little cube of useless metal.

"Was it? I...don't want you to feel like you have to be here, you know," he said softly. "You can leave if you want. I'm...not an easy person to be with." His smile had vanished like the sun passing behind a cloud.

"Aspen, I think that's the worst understatement I've heard all year. You're crazy, and you're a vampire, and you're unbelievably messed-up, and I think just being here is risking my life-"

With every word, she saw his face crumble a little more, the first cracks spreading across his eyes. It was a good act, he put on, and as long as no one saw under all the meanness and wacky violence, it was safe. But if you knew where to hurt him...it was too easy to pry him apart.

"-but apart from that, you're the sweetest guy I know, and you really are too cute for anyone's peace of mind. Oh, and we're destined for eternity."

He stared at her, the dimming light throwing strange patterns on his face. He, she felt, was something wild that had strayed into her arms by pure and blessed mistake, and at any moment, he might snap or run.

"I want this," he muttered quietly, eyes dropping to stare at the ground. "You're the only thing I've ever wanted in my life. I never asked to be who I am, or where I am, or what I am, even if people would kill to be those things. I just..."

She understood him perfectly. "No one will mess it up," she said firmly, believing it with a hopelessly firm faith she hadn't felt in a long time. "I won't, and you won't and no one else stands a chance."

He was hers. She felt it with a deep, protective instinct. He was on her list of the people she loved fiercely, who she would let no one hurt and who she would fight to the death for.

"Why did they tell me vermin were bad?" he asked her, his fingers tracing up and down her spine, arms curling around her. He was someone who needed contact like air, she recognized, contact that didn't threaten him. "They told me that you were food, and that you didn't care about anything but yourselves."

"They?"

She didn't like the fragility that fluttered in his eyes like a butterfly caught in a tornado. "No one."

"Someone," she corrected. Were they the ones who had made him this way? "Who?"

"No one," he repeated, the first note of panic in his voice. "Leave it alone, ver-Tamara. It's...nothing."

As she heard his fright, she realised that it was her hurting him. She didn't hurt her friends, and she didn't hurt him. "All right." His arms relaxed about her a little. But under her fingers, his pulse was pounding like the feet of a fugitive. "Why did you come here, Aspen?"

Both of them jumped when another voice answered.

"It seems obvious to me." There was a sharp click, and it sent terror spilling down her veins. She knew that sound.

It was the safety on a gun.

Tam turned, and Ellie was there. Calm and stunning, immaculate as the shine along the rifle. Tam recognised it; it was the same one Ellie had held to her head and threatened her with. It had been a birthday present from her father who reckoned that all girls should be able to do three things: cook, dance and shoot.

It was the last one that had clued Tam in to just where Ellie got her interesting perspective on life from.

She moved forward, hands out. "Leave it, Ellie. This isn't your business." I must be mad, she thought. I'm approaching someone with a gun and a serious mental problem.

The girl laughed. There was the reckless abandon in her eyes that Tam had seen while she chased petrified shifters through the woods and fields. "This is exactly my business. This is how it's meant to be."

For a moment, Tam was thrown. Meant to be? What did she think this was, some kind of game? "You are not going to shoot anyone. Don't you get it? I'm not playing your game anymore."

"Because of him?" She gestured, and Tam swallowed as for a second she stared down the barrel. Silver bullets, she knew, and the gun oiled with oak resin. A simple combination that would kill anything Nightworld. Oh, and her. Last time Tam checked, she wasn't bullet-proof.

"Not just that," Tam said levelly. She couldn't seem to drag her eyes from the gun. "Because killing anyone is wrong. I don't know why you don't understand it, but that's how it is."

"I saw you with him." Ellie smiled faintly. "I thought I'd got it wrong at first. But it was you two, together again."

She had seen them the first time? She hadn't noticed anyone, but then...Aspen was enough to take anyone's mind off anything, especially when he was being psychotic.

"Get out of the way," Ellie said curtly. Her eyes were cool, shadowy wells, and her skin was camellia-blossom silky. She could have been a Nightperson herself, and maybe she should have been.

"Make me."

"No!" It was Aspen, and he was shaking his head. Tam turned to look at him, making sure she kept herself between the gun and him. "Tamara...don't. It's okay." His eyes seemed to flick up for a moment, above Ellie's head.

Tam followed his stare...and saw a flash of shadows and cobalt. Blue! Her heart leapt. Blue was there. He was Aspen's friend...

Her soulmate pushed her out of the way. His pupils were enormous, swallowing up his eyes, but calm. "It's all right," he said. "I am a monster. I know that. I guess I deserve to die."

Blue was poised, a lean coil in the green-tinted light. The sun had almost set now, and their silhouettes were impossibly long and thin.

She looked at Aspen. Trust me, his eyes said. I eat people like her for breakfast. Literally.

And stepped aside.

Ellie laughed, and raised the gun.

Now, Tam urged Blue silently. His blue eyes flicked her direction for a second, electrically bright. Then he shrugged, and relaxed, and blew her a treacherous kiss.

She was screaming as the gun fired.

Aspen's eyes were burned into her mind as he fell to his knees. For a moment, she thought he would be all right. It was a tiny hole, a neat cut in his shoulder. Then she saw the exit wound. It had blown a hole the size of her hand in his shoulder.

You promised no one would hurt us, the bleak horror in his eyes whispered. You lied to me.

I lied, Tam was screaming silently, while she ran to his side, stupid, whimpering sounds escaping her, and a strange numb disbelief spreading across her body as she tried to stop the bleeding with her hands. But she couldn't, please no, she couldn't.

Oh god, I lied.

_But never is a promise, and you can't afford to lie._

X - X - X - X - X

Comments would be loved, loved, loved - thanks for reading!


	7. Chapter Seven

hank you to everyone who reviewed last time round :-) It was hugely appreciated!

Thanks: **Cynical Leaf, Persephone, Myst, Starwisher, Night Goddess, Kitty Katt, Me, Dark Angel, Jen, **and the wonderful **Jezebel. **

The lyrics come from Dido's 'Don't Slide'.

Hope y'enjoy!

**Remember Part Seven**

_You brought this on yourself and it's high time you left it there._

He was bleeding. For a moment, Tam had a horrible recollection of that day when she had walked into Rob's house and found him covered in blood. She had never let on how absolutely terrified she had been; how her hands had shaken while she dialled an ambulance, and then his parents, and then went back up to press compresses onto his wrists, and to try to bring him round.

Then it was gone, and it was Aspen she was staring at.

"I should shoot you too," she heard Ellie say.

"Why don't you bugger off, you repulsive bitch," Tam snapped, losing all semblance of calm she had. "You just shot my soulmate!"

"She was talking to me, actually," Blue Malefici said from somewhere nearby. There was a curious flat sound, and a thud.

"What did you do?" Tam said absently.

"Cooked a light salmon soufflé. What do you think? I removed the problem." Blue's feet appeared in her view. Bare, and covered in green marks and mud. He looked, she thought, as though he should have been running through a jungle with the wind in his hair and the roots clutching uselessly at his feet. A thing of controlled power and poise, almost elemental.

It didn't make her hate him any less. She wanted to punch him right in that perfectly malicious smile.

"You let him get shot!" she said furiously. God, god, he wouldn't stop bleeding.

"I doubted if he'd really die for you," Blue explained as if it was perfectly justified. "Patently he would."

"No, really?" she hissed. Stop the bleeding...pressure, pressure. She looked at Blue. "Take that T-shirt off."

His eyes widened in mock astonishment. "I only strip to music."

"I need something to stop the bleeding. Take it off. Now."

"Why don't you take that dress off instead?" he said with sepulchral innocence. "You can't save him with first aid, my dear. However much the pair of you have been practising it lately."

"What am I supposed to do?" she shouted at him. "You could at least call an ambulance!"

"No chance." His voice had chilled like a dying star. "Anyway, there's a witch on her way."

She was caught off-guard. "What?"

Slow and patronizing tones, and the deliberate upwards curl of his mouth. "There is a witch on her way. I can say it in twelve other languages if it would make more sense."

Please, she begged Aspen, stay here. She could still feel his mind, that rapid, manic whirlpool, but it was shrinking in on itself, waning...

"Yes." He did something that surprised her then; knelt down, and put a hand over the wound. Tam caught her breath as what looked like black, oily fire covered his hand. "I can keep him alive until she gets here."

"Why would you help?" she asked him, so, so confused by this strange and cruel boy.

Blue glanced at her briefly. For a second, she saw something swirling in his eyes, something awful and monstrous which made the metallic taste of blood choke her suddenly-

Before Tam had even realised, she had screamed and covered her eyes. The dazzling, burning blue colour was burned into her mind like a sunspot.

"I'm just bursting with charitable instincts," he purred, and a savannah wind filled her nose. There was something unearthly about him that made Tam's flesh creep until she thought it would slough free from her bones. "Now...while we're here, tell me about these vampire hunters of yours."

"No." Whatever they did, none of them deserved to be given into Blue's hands.

"It wasn't a request."

"I don't care," said Tam flatly, memories flashing through her head. "I-"

His smile was sudden and daggered. "Maybe you should ask Aspen to teach you to shield your mind. That was most instructive."

Agape, she stared at his cold, pale face. Her own thoughts had betrayed her. "What...will you do?"

"Oh, now that would be telling," he whispered. His words were sharp as glints of light on frost. "But let's just say...people always underestimate how much damage you can do with a lighter and some wire."

He was serious. Perfectly, deadly serious. She averted her eyes, looking at the body of her soulmate. That was better than what she saw in Blue, and it was only the sound of frantic footsteps that rescued her.

X - X - X - X - X

Rob was drowning in an ocean of fire. It danced and hissed around him, and cindering lava melded his feet to it, so he couldn't do anything but stand and hurt.

And god, it hurt.

He kept thinking he could hear a voice that was telling him to stop fighting, to just relax and stop resisting.

He couldn't remember how he had got here. There had been...a party. And windows shattering. And a pouting black mouth. Features seemed to grow outwards from the mouth, flowing into a blunt, flat nose, and round swelling cheekbones. A face like a snake's, curving and predatory. And-teeth. In his neck.

A vampire had bitten him.

_Would you stop fighting? _an exasperated voice spat at him. _God, I hate the mental links this makes. You shouldn't be able to fight me!_

Yeah, he thought to himself, but Tam always said I was stubborn and stupid, and that I liked banging my head against a brick wall until I wore a hole in it.

The fires were starting to shiver around him, and other ghostly shapes were laid over them, He rubbed his eyes, and blinked several times. The shape...of Ellie's study. And the horrible, nettle-like pain of teeth in his neck, only magnified, and ringed by the warmth of her mouth.

Oh god, it was like having a huge leech attached to him.

He could move his arms again. She had one in an armlock, but he pushed at her head frantically.

It struck him that he was fighting for his virtue.

He could sense her in some vague, eerie way. With every mouthful of his life she swallowed, the feeling grew stronger until he thought he had two hearts, one beating the slowing, comatose rhythm of himself, the other the strong drum of her pulse.

The gunshot rattled twice in his ears, one seeming to echo the other.

And then the voice came, curt and cold. _Telerana. ana...ana...ana..._

She, Rob realised, was Telerana. That was her real name, not Therese. She lifted her head from his neck - oh, thank god - and he slumped limply, trying to cope with the unnerving sensation of being two people.

_Bane? ane...ane...ane..._ Her voice was fainter now that they weren't physically connected. But she was...influencing him, making him stand still. _What is it? is it, is it..._

Got to do something, Rob thought sleepily. Really, he didn't mind the slow, balmy mist that trickled into his thoughts. He felt strangely reckless, as though nothing really mattered at the moment.

_Aspen's been shot, ot...ot...ot..._ And then came an image that pounded some of the stupid fogginess from Rob's mind altogether.

Tam. With blood on her, and Rob didn't know whether it was hers or Aspen's. Kneeling on the ground, with blood on her.

_Who did that?_ he shouted, in a shockingly accurate imitation of a foghorn.

_Ouch!_ Tel-Therese pushed him away to clap hands to her ears.

He recognised the dark voice then as Blue's. _Your friend Eleanor Saxoine did._ Tiny hints of malevolence. _I don't appreciate her shooting Aspen. It's inconvenient._

The drowsy feeling swept back over him as Therese wrapped a hand around his arm. Should shake her off, he thought. Should fight.

_No...you don't want to,_ her voice said, soft as silk. _You don't want to fight me._

_I think I do, _Rob thought, but all his defiance was seeping away. _I think...I don't know what I think._

_Entertaining though this is, do you think you could possibly get yourself out here? _Blue demanded. _We need to discuss how this is going to affect the future._

The world was a grey blur, and before Rob's eyes, it cleared into strange and wrong shapes. Someone lying on the ground, and a current running through him like voltage, and in the midst of all this wrongness, the heavy smell of blood.

It made him hungry. Really, achingly starving-

_How are you doing that? _Therese asked, her fascination intruding on the strange feeling. _Malefici, he was seeing through your eyes._

_Telerana, I believe that your unhappy meal has got some witchblood in him. Think you could take it out? He's a little too perceptive and quite frankly, irritating._

_I'm not killing him!_ Therese protested. Rob squinted at her through his blurry vision. She was licking his blood from her fingers like it was ice-cream. _If I leave him alive, I can taste him again._

_Get yourself out here,_ Blue ordered. _If you stay there, you're just going to play with that human._

_No._ Therese said defiantly. Rob was suddenly afraid...or was it her who was afraid?

Pain smashed over Rob like a tidal wave, knocking him to the floor and leaving him breathless. It cleared the vagueness from his head. For the first time since Therese had looked at him, he felt like himself again.

A very angry, vengeful self.

He staggered up, rubbing at his itching neck, and saw Therese curled into a tiny ball, moaning...Blue had done something. He didn't like Therese much, or even at all right now, but that had just been...wrong.

You should leave her, a voice said. She bit you. She deserves the pain.

No one deserved that, a rather more shaken than stirred voice said.

_Get out here,_ Blue drawled. It rang in Rob's head, echoing the pain, full of absolute confidence and authority. _Vermin, if she can't walk, drag her. Enough of my time has been wasted tonight._

X - X - X - X - X

The witch - and Tam was surprised to see it was Chatoya Irkil - was flushed from running, and flung down a bag to the ground. Bandages spilled out. "You said he was shot," she said to Blue. Tam couldn't help but notice the loathing in the witch's eyes as she glanced at the lamia. "What kind of bullets?"

"They weren't at all kind, witch of mine," Blue said coolly. "More of the lethal and metallic nature."

Witch of mine? Were they...together? Tam couldn't see it. Chatoya was...weird. And Blue was weird, but in an acceptable sort of way. The kind of way that said accept me, or pay.

"You-" The witch blinked slowly, her serene face astonished. "Tam? Tam Slone? Why are you here?"

Why's Blue calling you? Tam wanted to say. Chatoya obviously didn't like him, and he was looking at her in an avid, peculiar way. She felt like she should be searching for cover right about now.

"I was here when he got shot. He's...a friend."

A pause, then the girl let out her breath and with quick, efficient hands, pulled her black hair back into a ponytail that trailed down to the middle of her back. "All right, let me have a look."

Tam could only stare with awe as an aura of crisp green fire rippled around Chatoya, then expanded over the wound. The blood stopped, and as Chatoya made flicking gestures with her fingers, evaporated into a smoky mist that swirled up into the sky.

"Tam!" She turned at the voice, and saw a pale Rob, half-dragging Therese with him, for reasons she couldn't quite fathom. "Are you all right? Toya...what are you doing here?"

"Hiya Rob," the witch said quietly. "Right. Do you know what he's been shot with? There's something blocking me here...I've never felt anything like it before. And what are you planning on doing with him? He's going to have a nice scar from this, and it'll take at least a week for him to recover fully."

"We're taking him to my house," Tam said.

It was the equivalent of the Pope revealing his former life as an exotic dancer.

"We bloody well are not," Rob snapped.

They locked stares.

"Yes," Tam said through gritted teeth, "We are."

Rob snorted. He dropped Therese, and she lay on the ground, whimpering quietly. "What are you planning to say? Hi Mom, I know that he looks like an audition for the Godfather, but really, they only shot him because he's humanly challenged."

"I'm not going to tell them," she retorted. She had it all perfectly worked out...there was no way she was letting him out of her sight now. "I'm going to hide him in my room."

"Tam?" Rob waved a in front of her eyes. "Hello, is anyone home? Can we look at the practicalities of this situation? I mean...putting Aspen Martin in your bedroom?"

"What are you implying, Rob?" she said levelly. I know, but I'm going to make you say it.

He squirmed. "Look...the guy's got a reputation."

"Rob, he's been shot. If he has the energy to get up and ravish me in the middle of the night, I'll be pleasantly surprised." You've got teeth marks on your neck, she noted silently. Interesting...

"Pleasantly?" Rob's eyebrows shot up into orbit. "Where are you going to fit him so your parents won't see? Unless your wardrobe is a gateway to Narnia, nowhere! Be realistic."

"I am." Her eyes flashed dangerously. "Chatoya...can you put a spell on him so they won't see him?"

The witch paused in her healing. "Do you know Aspen is a vampire?"

"He bit me. That kind of gave the game away. And incidentally, if I hadn't known, that would have won you no prizes at all for subtlety."

Chatoya exhaled, her face briefly distant. "All right," she muttered to herself. "I can cast a hex to make anyone who sees him feel like he should be there. They won't realise anything is out of place. I can come over every day and check on Aspen. But look, it really would be easier to put him somewhere else-"

"No."

She had promised she wouldn't let anyone hurt him. She had left him alone for one fraction of a second and this had happened. She wouldn't trust anyone else with his life, however nice or powerful they were.

She couldn't say that though.

Chatoya looked taken aback. "Okay...well, we're going to have to carry him. Teleportation is beyond me."

"One of many things," Blue put in, his eyes the deep, smooth blue of a shark's skin.

The witch glared at him. Tam was grudgingly impressed; she couldn't have met Blue's eyes. Not knowing what she did.

But Chatoya pointed a finger at him, and in a voice that shook with anger, told him, "Either help, shut up, or get out. I am not in the mood!"

His voice became low and suggestive, almost purring, yet the air hardened into opaque marble. "You never are in the mood, witch of mine. Why don't you cast your mind back to just why you owe me?"

"Why don't you cast your mind back a little further? To my brother. And my parents. And my friend."

"Ah, the good old days," Blue sighed. Pleasure in his voice was a tiger rolling in the sun. "I miss them so."

Tam didn't have a clue what was going on, or what either of them was talking about, but she had the feeling that this argument was like a minefield. One wrong step and they'd all be sushi.

"You do try so hard not to be afraid," Blue murmured. "I'm quite impressed. So...let me help you out. Ms. Saxoine used oak resin in that gun, but it was melted down then mixed with diamond dust. It's a little known fact that diamonds hurt us, because it's a rare day when one encounters a maniac armed with a diamond knife or diamond bullets. That's what's blocking your pathetic little powers. You might want to try one of those highly illegal purifying spells. Or alternatively, an industrial vacuum."

"How do you know that?" the witch said sharply.

"Diamond reeks." A little smile, as if he found them terribly amusing, like a kindle of kittens.

"How do we know you're telling the truth?" Tam said sharply. Where had Ellie's gun gone? For the first time, she looked around - her eyes widened as she saw Ellie, heaped on the ground, a massive bruise sprawled across her skin like a blackberry stain. The firearm nowhere in sight.

"You don't, of course. Oh..." He gestured casually, and there was a strange ripping sound. Tam suddenly felt as if she'd put her forearm on a hot iron, and her arm jolted up reflexively.

"What was that?" she said angrily. Then she saw the black spiral burnt onto the hollow of her elbow.

His eyes stabbed into her. "Just in case you think about mentioning our conversation to anyone."

With that last cryptic sentence, he disappeared.

Literally disappeared. Where had he gone so quickly? One moment there, and next...empty space.

"I have got to start mining my house," she heard Chatoya mutter under her breath. "It wouldn't hurt him, but at least I'd know he was there."

Tam prodded the mark. It felt just like the rest of her skin, and it was hardly noticeable against the dark tone anyway. "What is it?" she wondered aloud. "It looks like a tattoo."

Chatoya glanced over. "I've never seen it. It's not a Nightworld mark. Okay...that's done it. Is your car here? Please don't tell me you walked."

"I drove," Rob said cheerfully. "I passed last week. Tam - are you sure?"

She met his eyes, and knew he could read the determination there. "Positive. What about those two?" She gestured to Therese and Ellie. Both, as far as she was concerned, could stay there.

Rob grinned. "Why don't we leave them there and see who wakes up first? Survival of the fittest."

Not to be speciest, Tam thought, but I hope Therese wins.

X - X - X - X - X

You watch as they leave, your beloved and their escort. Such fools, wrapped up in their own problems. Not even noticing the figure watching, always watching and waiting.

So close, that time. Almost close enough to touch.

But the shot had ruined everything. Another moment and it would have been right, it would have been perfect...

You blink, and for a moment, you see her. Anastacia, as she was the last time you met. The last time you stole her, and watched her betrothed's pain burn scarlet trails across his soul. So sweet, that victory.

And then you see her as she was finally, with the noose tight about her neck and her dress still because there was no wind that day, only a light damp rain that dripped down her swinging form.

You lost her then.

Lost her to her own guilt, her own folly.

But this time...oh, this time, you will only win.

X - X - X - X - X

Tam opened the door cautiously. Silence and dimness, only the loud tick of the hallway clock. Good.

She held it open as Chatoya and Rob shuffled in, carrying an extremely unconscious Aspen. Along the hall, stealthily creeping, feeling the relief sinking into her stomach. And-

"Tam, is that you?" A light under the living room door, she realised. Damn, damn, damn.

I can't let her see me like this! she thought, looking down at her torn, and blood-covered dress.

Her mother was intensely wonderful. Unfortunately, she was also psychotically protective when it came to her children. Tam gave Rob a desperate look, knowing he would understand.

Tam's mother's first reaction to Rob had been to sit her daughter down and teach her the facts of life, how men were only out for one thing and how you must never, never let them have it.

All right, Mom, Tam had said. Can I go and play in the sandpit now?

She turned her most hopelessly pleading, damsel in distress look on Rob. Since the day she had practiced judo on him ('It'll make men respect you,' her mother had said.), he had never been fooled by it.

He shook his head.

She turned her do-it-or-I'll-kick-your-ass look on him.

"I'm going, I'm going," Rob muttered under his breath, gesturing with his head that Tam should come and get hold of Aspen. They switched and Tam and Chatoya began a hurried, desperate shuffle up the stairs.

"It's us, Mrs Slone," she heard Rob shout as he disappeared into the living room. Tam fervently hoped her mother didn't demand to check her for signs of male ravagement.

"What are those on your neck?" came the sonic scream.

"Oh my god, the fang marks," Tam hissed. Her eyes met Chatoya's. "He got bitten..."

They could hear Rob, slipping into his boy-next-door charm with bashful ease. "Aw, gee, Mrs Slone, there was fondue, and someone got me with a fork."

Aw? Gee? Had they stepped into the Waltons?

Tiptoeing up the stairs, Tam waited to hear if her mother would swallow such a blatantly obvious lie.

"Fondue?" her mother said sharply. "Is that what you call it now?"

Along the corridor - and god, Aspen weighed a lot for someone so disturbingly scrawny - past Billy's room, past Celia's room, kick open the door and kick shut the raging panic, and drop him on her bed.

"That was close," Chatoya muttered. "I'll start setting the spells up...hang on!" she said, alarmed as Tam turned to go and assure her mother she was in good health.

There was a blinding light, like a camera flash, and the smell of static. When Tam looked down, her dress was clean, and her hair back in its immaculate styling.

"Well," her mother said when Tam came down. "Do you want to tell me how Rob got those marks on his neck?"

Rob was making strange gestures behind her mother's back that suggested horrible skiing accident rather than fondue.

"They had fondue," Tam explained. "It just got completely out of control."

Her mother gave her the look that said she didn't believe Tam one bit. "Hmm." Then her eyes widened.

Oh god, what have I forgotten? Dress still on, make-up intact, hair styled perfectly, no signs of mud or-

"Where are your shoes?" her mother shrieked furiously. "What have you been doing?"

Oh no...she had forgotten to go back and get them. Tam scuffed her feet and wondered if there was any possible way she could explain this that didn't sound highly suspect.

"I was giving her a...uh...foot massage," Rob leapt in bravely, straight into the line of fire. "I have a..uh...fetish."

No, no, bad phrasing. "What he means, Mom," she said hastily, "is that it's a hobby. Rob wants to be a chiropractor, and Ben didn't believe him, so he was proving his point."

"And if he wanted to be a gynaecologist would you let him prove his point?" her mother snapped irately. "If you think I believe that, young lady, you're in for a surprise. Now tell me the truth? Who was he?"

"He wasn't!" Tam protested. "Look, Mom, you don't have to believe me, but that doesn't make what I'm saying any less true!"

It was an argument her mother couldn't think of a reply to. Finally, she glared. "If I find you're lying..."

It was half an hour later before Rob escaped, with a hasty, "No, I'll steer clear of the fondue next time," smuggling an exhausted Chatoya out with him, and an hour before Tam did, having reassured her mother that there had been no drinking, no drugs, no smoking and no rampant sex.

It was with relief that she slept.

_Lie here and rest your head and dream of something else instead._

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading...love, love, love to hear what you think!


	8. Chapter Eight

Firstly, my apologies for the time this has taken; I have had univeristy open days, which took up four days of the weeks, exams, which took up another three, and a bout of illness. Oh, the joys of summer!

So thank you for your patience, and thanks to all of ye fabulous, fantastic people who reviewed last time round :-) You certainly cheered me up!

Thank you: **Dead Flower, Cynical Leaf, Danel, Persephone, Starwisher, Myst, Dark Angel, Kitty Katt, Me, Aquilla, Tough Fluff, **and the splendid **Starseeker, **

The lyrics are from OMD's Walking On The Milky Way; absolutely phenomenal song.

**Remember Part Eight**

_I don't believe in destiny, I don't believe in love  
I don't believe that anything will ever be enough._

Aspen woke up suddenly and mutely, with a terrible feeling of numb dread knotted in his stomach.

Not again, not again, please oh please not again...

He couldn't stop himself shaking convulsively, his arms locked around his knees. His teeth were chattering, because he thought he could smell them again in the dark, like they had always been there, smelling of expensive clothes and emptiness, shaped like humans. Really monsters.

When someone touched him, he flinched away and tried not to cry out, because if he made a sound they would hurt him more-

"It's me," a voice whispered. "I can feel that something's wrong...Aspen, it's Tam!"

"T-t-tam?" Was it really her? He blinked, and realised that he could see in this darkness, that it was only the light veil of a moth's wing, not the draped shrouded darkness of the bad place. "Where am I?"

"In my room. We brought you here after Ellie shot you." She was warm, and in the thin darkness, he could see the graceful curves of her face, and her skin like velvet. Too good for him, too pure and too whole.

He was a mess, a useless mess, and so afraid that he would hurt her and wouldn't know until it was too late.

"Can you put the light on?" he said timidly.

"Not really. My mom and my sister are only down the hall, and my brother's next door, and they might wake up." The gentleness of her touch was safety. "Aspen...are you afraid of the dark?"

He stopped breathing for a moment.

"Dumb, isn't it?" he said finally, his voice caught between a laugh and a choke. "People like me shouldn't be afraid of the dark - we're supposed to revel in it. But...it was always dark back there. I'd always be waiting, and I'd never see them, but they'd be there all the same. And they'd be quiet. But I felt..."

He stopped. He wouldn't let her hear it. He wouldn't taint her with that. If Tam knew, she would be disgusted, and she would hate him, and then she might leave and he didn't think he could survive that.

"Talk to me," she said. "Tell me."

"You don't want to know," he mumbled.

"I'm asking, aren't I?" She knelt up, looking straight at him, her eyes as clear as glass bowls of water. He wanted to pool into her, to let her wrap him up in the secure strength of her mind and stay there forever.

"You won't want to know if I tell you," he said flatly. His sister hadn't wanted to know.

She had laughed and told him that monsters under the bed didn't exist, and he had told her she had got it wrong. Been called a liar, and a stupid kid, and she hadn't even noticed that he died that day.

It had taken a long, long time before he was alive again. It had taken lives, and lives, so many lives he couldn't count. He couldn't count anyway, that was why he was failing all his courses, but this was just a number so immense that no one could count it.

"Please tell me," Tam beseeched him, young and human in her top and the tattered trousers she slept in. Her hair, her lovely, shimmery iridescent hair fell all around her face with the same hue as her eyes.

He would give in soon. That couldn't be allowed. That was asking too much.

"I don't want to!" he snapped, trying to remember all the anger he had once felt. "Why can't you just leave me alone! You're..." It was hard, but he said it. "-vermin. Just vermin. Okay, I'm f-"

And to his horror, the word caught. It stuck in his throat like a captive, slammed into silence.

"I'm mucked-up," he said finally, "but why do you have to keep digging? I don't want to tell you!"

Yet his voice had lost the bite, and he knew it. Still...he had hurt her. She took her hands away, and dropped her head so he wouldn't see her bite her lip like that, or blink her eyes so frantically.

He saw it all anyway.

Better to hurt her now, he reasoned, than kill her later. It had to be. Then she straightened, and put her hands on the bed so she could lean forward into the little corner where he was still clustered.

Her scent was like a ghost of summer days, reminding him that there had once been something other than waiting in the dark.

Tam watched him, and he couldn't shield himself from her. It wasn't like with them. He couldn't switch off, and send himself into imaginary places which were bright and beautiful, and where the sun never ever set. She was in his head, running in him like a fever, and he was trapped.

"Aspen," she asked quietly. "Why can't you say it?"

X - X - X - X - X

They both knew what she meant.

She tried to see his face, and could make out only the odd shape that the light threw at her. The sharp cheekbones, a silver light embedded in his hair. She let her mind furl open, like a lotus flower in the dawn.

"I hate the word," he said dully. As though feeling was beyond him now. "I hate how people throw it about, not understanding what it means. I hate what it stands for. It's empty and violent and mindless."

She hated the numb suffering she heard, and could feel only pity. "You know what you remind me of?"

"No," he said sharply. But this time, she felt the lie, a little lump of wrongness in the word. He was trying to be cruel. Deliberately. Why? Before, he had only embraced her help. "And I don't want to know either."

"What's wrong with you?" She leaned in angrily, not understanding why he was shoving her away like this when it was so clear that he needed her. "I'm sorry if I'm not worthy enough to be told what's wrong because I'm vermin. I'm sorry that you're being such a goddamn jerk. You're like a kid, Aspen, A kid. But you're not a kid, and the monsters under the bed don't exist."

"The monsters in the bed are worse," he said so softly, Tam wasn't sure if she heard him right.

It took a moment for it to sink in. Just what he meant. Emotions swamped her, knocking her perception of the world - of him - sideways. Disbelief, then with one brief look at his mind, that swum in solitary darkness surrounded by sharp shoals and deadly shadows, she understood the harsh truth of it.

"Oh god..." Tam said in a thin, odd little voice that couldn't be hers.

He shrugged, and drew in on himself even more. "It's okay. I get it. You don't want me anymore. Damaged goods and all. Don't worry about it." The worst thing was the way his voice was so tired and flat.

That was why he was so innocent with her, yet so unexpectedly violent. Why he flinched so often, and was afraid of the dark, and couldn't trust anyone even if he wanted to.

She felt his mind close off from her, sealing him into the stinking, filthy horror of his memories.

No one should live through that alone.

"No," she said, and reached out to him. she pulled herself up into the bed, and knelt in front of him, trying to make him look up at her. "No, don't do that! Don't make yourself alone."

He had just curled up into himself, small in the corner of the room, head buried in his knees. She pulled frantically at his locked hands, screamed and shouted and hammered on the fortress of his mind.

"Let me in," she said, not wanting the despair that was hurting her throat. "I want to know. I want to help."

His head snapped up furiously, and those eyes were the curious cold colour of liquid diamonds, sparkling and shifting. "You want to know?" he hissed, reminding her of nothing so much as a wounded wildcat, fierce and afraid. "You can't help me. No one can, and you don't want to know. You couldn't handle it."

"How do you know?" she challenged recklessly. Yes, she would have said, he was a monster then.

"Fine!" he almost screamed, and then he moved so fast she didn't see him

All she knew was that he was suddenly kneeling right by her, his face contorted in terrible, inhuman anger, and that he put one hand over her heart, with his teeth bared and harsh, broken breaths ringing in her ears.

He opened his mind.

She was launched into darkness, true darkness, not the midnight hush that she slept in each night. This was a place where the black was like liquid, drowning her and flowing over her.

The room was cold stone, and she was shivering in a corner of the room. Always shivering, always waiting for the first rush of air into the room, the first wispy hints of the smell that was all the warning there was.

Her heart hammered in her chest, despite being in this body that was more powerful than her own. Because she might be a vampire here, but she was still a kid and kids were always the ones who got hurt.

It curled into her nose, and she was scrabbling back into the corner as if she would sink into the stone, thinking nopleasenonono, and biting her tongue to keep from screaming or sobbing while the hot and silent tears slipped from her eyes, as they always did.

And then that first spidery touch-

"No!"

It wasn't her, it was Aspen, and she was launched back into the comfort of her familiar, simple room.

He had let go of her and had his hands over his face. She was puzzled, then she realised he was crying in the same quiet, heartbroken way, and there was nothing she could do to take away what she had just seen.

She felt sick. Physically sick. And so, so angry at whoever it was. God, how could anyone do that to a kid?

She didn't know how long she sat there, wanting to say something, finding that the words simply were not there. Being a moderately good person did not give her the ability to wave the problem away.

She didn't know if he wanted touch right now, but it was all the solace she could offer. She just put her arms around him and when he fought her, let go, but then he held on for a moment, and she saw the bleak drifts of his eyes, shellshocked and pleading.

"You were right," she said, gathering all the courage she had ever believed that she had. "I don't want to know, but you have to tell someone, Aspen, because you can't deal with that on your own. You can't."

He stared at her, not seeming to notice the tears that wove silvery mazes across his face. So wide, his eyes, so horribly young and trapped. "You won't leave me?"

"I won't leave you."

For a long time, he just clung to her and said nothing. And when he did speak, it was in broken sentences that sometimes trailed off in flashes of emotions that lit her head like the battlefield skies of the First World War. She only listened, because there was nothing she could offer to change what he said.

Sometimes, you could only be there.

His voice was her world in that gloomy night, her only entrance to a past that was long gone, yet still more real to him than the present. And when he stopped, and told her that that was it, that was all of it, she thought how little time it took to tell something so immensely destructive.

He fell asleep finally, the wall at his back, while Tam lay looking at his face in the growing light. There was no sign of the anguish she had seen, only smooth flawless beauty. How many people hid their own dark places under the clever masks, how many people were in truth crouched in a dark corner, waiting?

She prayed she would never know.

X - X - X - X - X

Light chiselled into her eyes slowly. Another day-_hang on._ The memories of the night filled her.

Somehow she knew the events of that night would remain there. The knowledge would be between them, but not as a gulf. As a bridge. It would be their knowledge, something that evaporated with the light.

For now, while the sun shone, she had other problems. The crashed party. Ellie. Rob and the fondue fun.

"Oh, god," Tam groaned. "I've walked into the season special of Dawson's Creek."

She turned on her side to look at Aspen. He looked strangely peaceful in sleep, with his vulnerability hidden, and his shoulder swathed in bandages, sighing softly as he exhaled.

"You are way too cute when you're asleep," she muttered.

"Thanks."

She squawked and fell off the bed with a resounding thump. "You might have said you were awake!"

"I didn't want to spoil the moment," he said shyly as Tam picked herself up. His smile was tentative, but grew as she met his eyes and held them. As the tide of night swept out, it had dragged with it his fractured fear. "But I think you managed that one okay yourself. And...thanks. For listening."

A rap at the door, and they both froze. "Tam?" her mother called. The door opened.

Tam's mother was an elegant divorcee, not at all pretty, but Tam had always loyally thought that her mother didn't need looks, not with her exuberant energy that touched everything. She fiercely believed in protecting wildlife, in a good Christian upbringing, in helping others and keeping well clear of vice.

She should have been lining up a firing squad the moment she saw Aspen.

"Morning," she said cautiously, preparing for Jodie Slone's inevitable screaming tirade.

Her mother's eyes fixed on Tam, and then slid to Aspen, causing fear to seize her heart tightly. Then they glazed over, and her mother said dreamily, "Morning, dear. Who's that nice young man?"

Nice young man. Tam checked that it was still Aspen sitting there. "That's Aspen Martin, Mom."

"Oh," she said brightly. "What's he doing here?"

It sounded rational, but there was a strange expression on her mother's face. She was being nice.

"We spent the night making mad, passionate love," Tam said curiously, still waiting for the explosion.

"That's nice, dear," her mother said. Where was the glare that could maim at a hundred paces and kill at ten? Last time Tam had brought a boy home, her mother's opening remark had been that he'd better respect her daughter because that the flowerbed was ripe for expansion, and wasn't the new meat cleaver nice?

"He's a pathological liar," Tam prompted. "He gambles at casinos all night and robs the elderly of their pension books. He shoots small squirrels with a water gun and runs a local mafia, whilst paying devout tribute to the devil and holding nude jazz parties in his hot tub."

"That's interesting, dear," her mother murmured. There should have been nuclear fallout by now. "And does he have any hobbies?"

"Debauchery, robbery and loan-sharking."

"Well, he seems a well-rounded young man." Obviously she was hearing something different. She picked up an ornament. "You need to dust your room," she chided gently. "Honestly, it's as bad as Celia's."

"Mother, he's a vampire," Tam said, trying the ultimate test. If this was Chatoya's spell...wow.

Her mother stilled, and met Tam's eyes. The odd glaze seemed to roll away like clearing mists. Oops...

"Don't be silly, dear, vampires don't exist," her mother said firmly. "Now do come down to breakfast."

X - X - X - X - X

Tam ended up wrestling her little brother - as always - for the sports section of the newspaper.

"Hey!" Billy protested, his face screwed up. He slapped Tam.

Did he just hit you? an enraged Aspen said. I'll-

The words trailed off as Tam hit him back and neatly arm-locked him. The vampire gawked as Tam's mother stepped gracefully over her children, swiped the newspaper and swatted the pair of them with it.

"Enough," her mother said firmly as Tam and Billy, glaring, sat down. "You can have the newspaper when I'm finished reading. Tam, is your boyfriend going to eat breakfast or just hover in the doorway?"

Boyfriend? As far as her mother was concerned, it was usually said in the same way most people said 'flesh-eating bacteria'. And she had that glassy, unseeing look whenever she glanced in his direction.

_Are you all right?_ Aspen asked, sounding appalled. _That was brutal!_

Tam hid her smile. _Fine. Look, if you don't come and sit down, Mom's going to notice something._

He moved forward uneasily, slinking into a seat at the table. His eyes flicked over the toast and cereal with slight confusion, as though he'd never seen them. Nose wrinkling as he took in the steaming coffee.

_Does everyone do this?_ he asked, looking like Christmas had just come. Yet he didn't touch anything.

_Yeah. Don't you? _He was hiding something from her, and it was fiendishly easy to dip into his mind and pluck it out. Tam flourished the evidence in from of him as it were a gauntlet. _You don't eat?_

He was starving, she realised. Absolutely starving. Not for blood, but for simple human nourishment. And he liked it that way because...

_I'm in control,_ he said flatly, reading her mind. _I eat when I have to. And you can stop thinking I'm screwed up. I know it, okay, but this is how I am. And I am not anorexic. Guys do not get anorexia._

_Fine, if you're not anorexic, eat something._

He glared.

"Cool eyes," Celia said. She had the same dark hair and deep bronze skin as the rest of them, but her eyes were a pale, hawkish amber. She stared hard at Aspen. "I like you better than the last one. You're cuter."

Tam pulled a face. "For all you know, he could be a vampire." Aspen's mental splutter sounded in her ears.

"Ooh, he can suck my blood any time," Celia said, grinning. "Is that why he's not eating anything?"

_Are all your family this naggy?_ an irritated Aspen demanded. _Why don't you just hammer in a big sign saying 'how do you like your stake'?_

"Is something wrong with the food?" her mother said in the faintly deadly tone that Tam was surprised to find she had missed. The tone that meant 'I am not accepting such bad manners'.

_Oh come on,_ Aspen said in disbelief. _Your mom can't be that bad._

"Young man," her mother said, holding her fork in a way that suggested it might soon be aimed at Aspen's eye at high velocity, "do you know how rude it is to refuse food offered by your hostess?"

She bent the skunk-eye stare his way, and turned it up from Mildly Peeved to Crash Helmets On.

Aspen gulped and muttered an apology before taking some toast. Tam smiled behind her hand.

_Oh, stop being so smug, _Aspen said sulkily.

X - X - X - X - X

"Ow."

Chatoya Irkil prodded the angry red wound with one finger. "That's why you aren't going anywhere," she said exasperatedly. "It's not healed yet. You're staying here today."

"Ow," Aspen said as she carried on poking him, emphasising each word with a jab. "I'm fi-Ow..."

"He seemed okay this morning," Tam said ruefully, looking at the nasty mess that was his shoulder minus the bandages as he sat on her bed wincing. "Thanks for those spells by the way. They're working a charm."

"They are a charm," Chatoya said dryly, a brief grin lighting her. "And that's beside the point. He-"

"Ow."

"-is not-"

"Ow."

"-going anywhere."

"All right!" Aspen yelped, leaping off the chair and grimacing. "Can you please stop using my shoulder to demonstrate your point? Jeez, just because you're missing breakfast."

"You obviously know it's not healed," the witch berated. "Honestly, Aspen, you've been shot-"

"Fine! I'll stay. Unless you want me to go with you..." he said to Tam, tilting his head charmingly.

"I'd feel better if you were home," Tam said. "Now that Mom's seeing you as one of the family, even if it is that nasty cousin she doesn't like much, she'll fight off the four horsemen if needs be."

Aspen half-smiled. "She seemed really nice to me. Just scary." His face was wistful. "Maybe if my mom had lived, she'd have been like that...and by the way, was that the bus that just went past the window?"

She and Chatoya ended up running for the bus, while a leering Celia and Billy laughed themselves stupid and didn't ask the driver to stop. When they finally got on, she found herself talking to Chatoya Irkil and finding out just why it was Rob had so much respect for her.

Perhaps if Tam had known what would happen, she wouldn't have let Aspen out of her sight

X - X - X - X - X

Rob's arm muscles protested as he hit a volley that crept over the net and dribbled to a stop. His back was threatening to sue as he jumped to catch the return lob, and his legs were setting up a formal rally with imminent strikes due as he ran frantically to get the wickedly fast forehand that Ben Skykes smashed straight past him with his usual combination of pent-up hormonal violence and skill.

"What's wrong with you today, Slivan?" an irritated Ben demanded. "We've got a doubles match in two days, and I'm giving up my lunchtime to practise while you're playing like a pensioner."

"That's unfair," Rob muttered fuzzily. He hadn't been feeling at all right since he woke up this morning. The world kept sliding in and out of focus and a heavy, pounding tiredness seemed to have settled under his skin like a layer of metal. Whatever the buzz that had kept him on a fondue-fantasy high was, it had gone.

"Yeah, it is unfair," as a fast-moving projectile whipped by. "Pensioners move faster."

Luminous yellow tennis balls flew past his ears as Rob tried to dredge up the energy to move. The nightmare just seemed to drag on and on-

Until the point when a ninety-mile-an-hour serve hit him in the forehead.

"Oh shit!" The wide azure sky was suddenly blocked out by the other person that Rob couldn't quite place, waving a hand in front of his eyes. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"That's across," Rob felt the need to point out. Why was he flat on his back? "Who are you?"

"What the hell's wrong with you?" The person kicked him in the leg which wasn't really conducive to helping his recovery. "You're supposed to be Rob Slivan, you know, faster than a speeding bullet?"

"I am?" he said, feeling there had been a rational sentence in there somewhere. "You're blocking my sun."

"I'm what? Okay, that's it, get up. I've given you enough sympathy, you're just being lazy."

"I can't," Rob said peacefully. The sun was simmeringly hot, so hot it reminded him of something (or was it somewhere). It made the pain in his neck fade. "Did you know your nostrils flare when you're annoyed?"

Ben came very close to practicing his backhand on Rob at that moment. And he would have, if someone hadn't moved smoothly past like a feather on the breeze, and knelt down.

"Go away," a voice that sounded like distilled fantasy ordered. There was no disobeying.

Rob blinked. The person seemed to have become thinner. And balder. Or was he imagining things?

"What are you doing?" he asked. He was aware that his inner adult was shrieking that this was someone dangerous, someone very, very dangerous, but he couldn't summon up the energy to care.

"I overdid it," the person muttered. One bony hand hauled him up to a sitting position. He felt like a ragdoll - if she let go, he'd just flop back down again. "Vermin, what's your name?"

He should have known. Like he should have known his age, or the way home, or why he was lying down, but he couldn't quite catch hold of anything. Only her reptilian face had any clarity.

"You're not going to start singing about trusting in you, are you?" he said.

"Great. Just great." He thought a forked tongue flickered briefly. "All right, vermin, it's like this. I'm a vampire. I drank your blood, only I didn't get to finish what I started. I want to change you."

"For what?"

"Not for. Into. I want to make you into a vampire. You can have immortal life, massive powers, the whole shebang." She shook him, the oil wells of her eyes slicking over him. "You'll die if I don't, incidentally."

"Oh." It didn't seem to be too bad to him. "Okay. Do I get a refund if I don't like it?"

"No." He felt a cool hand on the back of his neck, and a burning sensation began near his throat.

The pain was replaced by something else, a feeling, a taste like the stars melted down and combined with the night. He was flying, filled with light and filled with strength, soaring out past the sky and into deep space, spinning past stars and into a source of power that was pure fire, pure blood.

A strange sleepiness came over him. And when he awoke, he would be someone quite different.

_Oh, man, you should have seen us on the way to Venus  
Walking on the Milky Way - it was quite a day._

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks for reading! I'd adore knowing what you think :-)


	9. Chapter Nine

Thanks to the lovely people who reviewedlast time - thank you **Cynical Leaf, Dead Flower, Me, Starwisher, Jen, Diomede, Night Goddess, Aquilla, Kitty Katt, Persephone, Angelphire, Meg, Angelic Angel, **and the fabulous **Ice Princess. **

As might be obvious, I really love hearing what you think, both goods and bads; criticism will not offend me, honesty is cherished. Please do take a moment to review - it helps me improve the story.

The lyrics are from Green Day's gorgeous Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) which I fell in love recently. Lovely, mellow and acoustic song.

**Remember Part Nine**

So make the best of this test and don't ask why:  
It's not a question but a lesson learned in time.

Aspen was asleep. That was his first mistake.

He had felt so safe, even in her disgustingly girly room in its pastels and prettiness, that for the first time since he could remember, he just curled up and caught up on twelve years of missed sleep. Her pillow smelled like the rosemary shampoo she always used, and it made him miss her.

Aspen couldn't imagine missing anyone.

But he couldn't imagine needing anyone so much, either. Maybe he loved her a little too. Not in the live-in-your-eyes-die-in-your-arms sense, or he didn't think so, not yet, but purely for her kindness and her fear and her courage in the face of that fear.

He also really, really wanted to bite her.

But he had got the impression last time that it wasn't too polite.

So there he was, in his floating empty sleep, absently walking the dreamwebs, when something woke him up.

There was a girl standing over him with a massive bruise on her face and a gun. He had a very nasty feeling of déjà vu.

He shouted for Tam. That was his second mistake.

_Tamtamtamtamtam..._

She was in some kind of a lesson, staring at squiggly symbols and numbers. For a brief moment, Aspen understood algebra, then she tuned in. _Aspen? Are you okay?_

_That girl's come back!_ he shouted at her, panicking. _She's got a gun, and she's pointing it at me!_

_Ellie?_

_I don't know! I haven't stopped to ask her name! It's the one from the party...the one Blue let shoot me._

She had asked him why he wasn't angry at Blue for that. "Do you get mad at your cat when it hunts mice?" Aspen had said with a shrug. "It's like being angry at rain for being wet." It was just vintage Blue. He'd known the guy for ten years, and he was like luck. Whimsical, weird and occasionally a right w-

_Stay there,_ she ordered. He sensed her getting up, ignoring the teacher's startled question and tearing out the classroom like a mad thing. _I'll be there in twenty minutes if I run. Call Blue...call Therese..._

_Done it already. _He couldn't reach Therese, but Blue's cool voice was speaking in his ear. Aspen didn't know if it would work...but he could try. _Don't know if-_

Her mind cut out suddenly, and left him alone.

X - X - X - X - X

Rob blinked slowly.

There was an astonishing cobalt radiance above him, like a thousand kingfishers had spread wide their wings. Wait. No. That was the sky.

And he was lying on his back. But surely the sky wasn't so bright, and the sun didn't sear into his eyes like a blowtorch, and he normally never felt so strange...or...

"How do you feel?"

A face appeared over him, and a hand touched his forehead, strangely cool for the warm golden tone of her skin, a hand that swept short lines down to the sweat-dried curls of his hair. He looked at the round snake-like curve of her cheekbones, and the oddly flat nose, and the burning intensity of those dark eyes.

Oh no.

She was dangerous, she was very dangerous, and she had already bitten him once. But something...something was different this time. Her face seemed sharper, and he swore he could see the butterfly-flutters of her pulse in her lips and her skin, and hear the slither of her breath.

He could smell her too. Like clean sand and sweetly fragrant heaps of sawdust.

This was weird.

"Are you going to bite me again?" he said edgily, sitting up because at least that way he didn't feel so vulnerable. Unfortunately, it meant getting closer to her, but Rob solved that problem by scrabbling back at the same time until he was half-crouched away from her.

He was on the tennis court.

How had he got there? He remembered being bitten, and taking Tam's bizarre boyfriend home because he had been...hurt somehow, the details were hazy, and there had been strange nightmarish dreams, but the entire morning - or maybe it had been days, he didn't know - evaded him, lurking at the back of his mind like a taunting imp.

He could meet her eyes now, and the colour in them moved like a bird's shadow over a lake, rippling and changing strangely. Not black, like he had thought, but filled with deep swirling blues and surprisingly feminine glitters of pale yellow and green.

He didn't even notice he had crept forward to gaze at her until he was impolitely close, and staring with unabashed fascination.

She seemed to be having trouble forming words. "You're too close," she told him finally.

"Huh?" Rob blinked. How had he gotten this near? He moved back a little, marvelling at the way his movements seemed to melt into one another, and ignoring the little warning voice in his head. "Well...are you going to bite me?"

"No. Never again." The girl pursed her mouth, and the light rippled along it in white bars. Rob didn't even realising she was saying something until she stopped. "Did you hear a word of that?"

"Of what?" The light hit her face in strange ways too, and how had he never noticed the light collected in golden speckles on her cheeks? And how long her eyelashes were in strange contrast to the rest of that bare and smooth face, sleek and slender as otter's fur, and right now stark against the hollows of her sockets as her eyes widened.

Pretty, he thought. More than pretty, amazing, like watching a sunrise in someone's face. Seeing the world in a whole new way, only instead of being turned wonderful crimsons and pinks, she was a flushing gold.

"Robert!" The first time she had used his name, rolling the 'r's and making it rich, exotic, not pronouncing the 't'. Even her voice was different, thrumming with layers of music like a symphony. Keep talking, Rob thought dazedly, I have to hear more. "I changed you."

The words made no sense to him. Rob frowned. "I don't understand."

"I made you a vampire."

So flat, so easily said, but they thudded into him like bullets, one after the other.

_I..._

know that can't be true, said the little voice he had so stupidly ignored, but that now suddenly exploded at full volume, drowning out even the strange new brightness of the world. It

_...made..._

no sense. Common sense told him that things could be made but people were people. They just were. You couldn't make or unmake them and anyway, vampires didn't bite

_...you..._

or sink their teeth into your neck at a death of a party and tell you they would drown in you, and leave you so exhausted you collapsed and couldn't remember anything except strange and wonderful dreams and an odd sense of peace. But he knew that was

_...a..._

lie because she had. She had and he was a

_...vampire._

X - X - X - X - X

"Hello," she said quietly, pointing the gun at him. Her eyes were bright and lustrous, rich as autumn leaves drenched in sunlight. "I don't suppose you remember me."

"I do," Aspen said flatly. He didn't know how pale his skin had gone, chalky and around his lips, almost blue. He didn't know that he looked suddenly very young.

She might have been considered beautiful. Her features were symmetrical, her lips lushly pouted and her eyes narrow, made sultry by the clean arcs of her bone-structure, and graced by smooth skin. Her clothes fitted perfectly, and she was even smiling.

They had been beautiful too.

She laughed, and the sound scuttled through him like a cockroach, making him clench his teeth against waves of revulsion that turned his skin into goosebumps. "Go on, then. Who am I?"

"You're a vampire hunter," he said quietly. Be calm, oh, be calm because people like this will drink your fear from the inside out and leave your empty shell to putrefy. "You're vermin, and you're called Eleanor something, and you hate Tam and you shot me."

"Wrong."

Aspen could only stare. He knew everything he had said was true, yet there was absolute confidence in her voice.

"I was all those things," she said calmly. She gave an odd little shake of her head, making the twisted loops of her earrings glitter. "But everything changes. Anastacia."

X - X - X - X - X

Runrunrun... How could it be so far to her house? It was only ten minutes by bus, but those minutes seemed to be stretching into eternity.

"Want a lift?"

The car that screeched to a halt beside her was an old sea-green Fiat, so battered it looked like it should have been crumbling on a scrapheap, or possibly in a museum. Blue gestured to the passenger door.

"What are...you do...ing here?" Tam gasped out between choking breaths.

"Aspen gave me a yell," Blue said casually. "Called in a favour I owe him. You know, did it not occur to you that leaving Aspen in your own home might be a fairly obvious place?"

"Has anyone told you you're a complete bitch?" Tam said furiously as she got in, throwing him the quelling glare that had made so many people apologise hurriedly. It was the one useful attribute she had inherited from her mother.

He flashed her an easy, charming smile that didn't reach the polar ice of his eyes. "Few have ever got to the end of the sentence."

He floored the accelerator and to Tam's extreme shock, the car took off like a rocket. Something this old should not be able to go at...ninety...three...miles an hour... "How old is this car?"

Blue looked over at her. Tam found it slightly disconcerting that he didn't seem to recognise that keeping your attention on the road was a vital part of driving. "Same age as me. Seventeen and a bit."

Tam had something she had been wanting to ask him, and now it flashed into her mind as forgotten resolutions so often do. She brandished her arm in front of him, neatly obscuring his vision and completely coincidentally, elbowing him in the nose.

"What the hell is this mark?" she demanded.

Unbeknown to her, Tam was the first person to startle Blue since he had first met Chatoya Irkil.

The blue eyes narrowed a touch, becoming two lines of sapphire in his pale face. "It's a guarantee."

"Of what?" Tam snapped. "It had better expire pretty damn quick, or there'll be..." Her words trailed off as Blue turned his stare on her. It was like being blasted by a blowtorch.

"You amuse me, vermin girl," he said softly. "Let me indulge you. That mark tells anyone belonging to a select range of organisations that they are free to kill you. And let me indulge you further and explain my motivations. I'm curious as to what happens if one's soulmate dies."

Tam felt her body ice over at the calculated coldness. "You know about soulmates."

"I have one." Blue tilted his head on one side, still utterly ignoring the road. "I also had a headache once. It too was a constant companion that interfered with my thoughts and my life. I got rid of it."

"You're a monster," Tam said flatly.

"Well, yes, but I don't like to boast." The brakes screamed, and Tam swore as she hit the front dashboard at a painful speed. But the pain was half-forgotten as she realised they were outside her house, and she could see a tall silhouette in her window, a silhouette she knew at once as Ellie.

She hardly heard Blue's parting, "Next time, wear a seatbelt." But oddly, she didn't hear the car pull away.

X - X - X - X - X

"Mwah?" was Aspen's brief and yet telling contribution. Then he recovered himself and said hysterically, "What did you call me?"

The laugh was bewitching. It rippled like a nightingale's song through his head, swathed in pure darkness. Chilling, haunting, utterly enthralling...

He had heard it before.

No, no, no...it must have been at the party, it had to have been at the party, because-

"It's true, my dearest," Eleanor whispered softly. Her eyes were shiny and full as conkers, briefly shielded by her eyelashes before she looked straight at him. "I don't suppose you remember, do you? We were in France then, of course, and you were just a shy court girl-"

"I'm a man!" Aspen said indignantly. "I have testosterone, and a deep voice, and facial hair, and certain anatomical features which I'm almost certain women don't have-"

She levelled the gun at him, and Aspen felt a sudden compulsion to be very silent and very still.

"What you are and what you were are two very different things," she proclaimed softly, and her full mouth curled upwards. He saw the curve of an axe in her lips, and the plump sheen of light on them matched the gleam of sunlight from a blade...

And he remembered.

Oh god...the whole sordid affair. An affair with this girl, only then she had been a man with rich dark-blue eyes like a swallow's wing, who had lured him away from Tam. But Tam had been different then too, she had been a Comte with land to keep, and fathoms deep in her soul that she had never let Aspen...or Anastacia see...Tam had been a man with steely grey eyes, eyes as fierce as they were now.

He had taken her aloofness for something it was not; he had made the same mistake in this life too, when he had first seen her. Thought of her as one of the proud and popular bitches that stalked around like they owned the world.

Then, she, the Comte had been the Nighteprson, and this fruitcake of a girl, this Eleanor, she had been a Nightperson too, and he the human.

And now, the positions were reversed.

Then, three hundred years ago, he had taken his own life. He had seen the love of the Other - this Eleanor - for the gaudy sham it was. It was lust, it was a desire to take Anastacia and tame her, and toy with her, and finally, Anastacia had cracked...or rather, her spine had in a noose.

Because he could see it now, see what he had not seen that last fatal time.

The darkness ran slick in Eleanor Saxoine's eyes, ran like a bubbling, terrible river of acid. It wanted to consume all it touched, to envelop all in herself.

She had hated Tam then, and it came back to him now, the cold clear words of the Other in that final evening.

He has everything. It has been handed to him on a platter, and he cares nothing! Well, I have taken what he shall miss, and I will destroy him. And the Other had fixed the tainted depths of his eyes on Anastacia, crouched there in her pretty dress with a bruise spreading the length of her side from where the Other had hurled her in a fit of rage. You're mine, pretty, and you don't ever mention his name again!

"You took me to hurt Tam," he said slowly, hardly able to believe it.

"Oh, but you were so pretty," Eleanor cooed. "I wanted you for you, too." Her face contorted. "But you wanted to go back to him!"

"You hit me," Aspen pointed out. Not once, not twice, but time after time because the Other could not control its - and nothing so cruel could be human - jealous rages, imagining Anastacia to be flirting with others, kissing others, whoring with others.

He could feel an indignant, strange anger rise in him. The anger of injustice, that the child he had been had once felt, that the French noblewoman he had once been too had felt every day. "I was chutney by the time you were done with me."

Her lips drew back and she snarled at him. The sound reverberated, low and ferocious. "You were mine but you thought of him!"

"If it's me you're after, why did you shoot me?" an irritated Aspen asked. This girl was loopier than a slinky, but the anger was getting to the point where he almost wanted her to shoot him.

It was why Therese and Blue had called him erratic. He didn't care if he died, just as long as he spited someone on his way out. Just as long as he didn't have to remember cowering in corners and waiting in shadows, just as long as this miserable life was gone-

_Aspen!_ That voice, it was everything, and then he remembered why he couldn't die.

The suicidal rage was quenched, because Tam was nearby and Tam mattered to him more than anyone. If he died, he'd hurt her, and there was nothing worse than that.

They're right, Aspen thought evenly. I'm crazy. But she doesn't care about that, so neither do I.

"Why?" The gun shoved under his chin brought reality in - metaphorically - a shot. "I wasn't aiming for you. I was aiming for her! But she screamed and I was...distracted..."

The gun was drawn back. Eleanor stared down at him, and her face softened fractionally. "I never meant to hurt you," she murmured.

Aspen did a classic impression of a goldfish. "You arranged a bloody party to hunt me down and kill me!" he shouted.

_Don't annoy her, _Tam was saying. _Oh god, where's the spare key, if Billy or Celia have taken it, I will kill them..._

"No!" She shook her head vigorously. "Only to punish you. Not to kill. The other two...yes..."

"How did you know about us?" he said. They had been so careful - Blue had insisted.

Her laugh was harsh. "It was easy. I remembered the moment you arrived. Two years ago, when I had only just begun to find out about the Nightworld. I knew who you had been, and I had been a vampire myself, don't forget. It's easy to see others of your own kind...or who were my kind."

She spun wildly, smashing at the crystal windchimes in Tam's room until they shattered. Not caring about the flakes that cut her smooth skin. "Why should they be born with those powers, when I can't have them?" she cried desperately. "The first one we caught, I asked him to change me, but he wouldn't, he wouldn't...so I killed him. And I killed all of them. They didn't deserve immortality."

_What are the prerequisites? _Tam said sharply. _Bloody minded insanity? Brutality? More problems than an agony aunt's column?_

All, Aspen thought uncomfortably, qualities either he, Therese and Blue had. But they were exceptions, not the rule. And besides...he was going to change. If she wanted him to. He'd do anything for Tam.

"I tried so hard to feel guilty, you know," Eleanor said almost gently. "But in a way, I was glad when I shot you. You deserved it, for choosing her." Her hands caressed the gun in a way that was extremely disturbing. "How can I love what I hate?"

"You don't love me," Aspen said angrily.

_Got it! _Tam crowed. Her mind was cut off from him for a second in her victory.

"But I do," Eleanor insisted. "That's why I'm going to kill Tam."

Aspen managed a spate of inarticulate consonants.

Faint dreamy smile. "Daddy gave me a good Christian upbringing."

_What, he burnt her on a pyre daily?_ Tam snapped. Her feet on the stairs, stealthy but swift. Along the corridor, avoiding the squeaky floorboards with childhood ease: grace and humanity mingled in a way that awed him. _I know 'Daddy' and the only thing he gave her was a credit card and a superiority complex. I'm going to slap her stupid..._ She hadn't heard what Eleanor said and he had to warn her now-

_No! _Apsen shouted. _Don't come up here, Tam, it's not me she wants to hurt, it's you, it's you and it was always you..._

But too late, the door was opening and he saw, as if in slow motion, Eleanor turning and raising the gun in the instinct of the shocked; truimph roared in her eyes as she saw Tam.

"Well, if it isn't the Comte," Eleanor purred.

He felt the explosion like fireworks searing wildly across the sky as memories burst into Tam's mind.

_We're...here again, _her voice said in his head; but it was two voices, one laid over the other in perfect harmony._ I remember this. I remember how it must be._

"You leave him alone!" Tam snapped, her eyes flicking to Aspen. Funny, he thought dreamily, how they could be the same colour as Eleanor's...yet so different, so warm and kind.

"Oh, I won't leave him alone," Eleanor said coyly. He saw Tam's face change as the gun was levelled at her. "After all, he'll have me. This time, there is no choice."

"Are you mad?" hissed Tam, his soulmate, his saviour, more than he had dreamed.

_Get out! _Aspen shouted at her. _Tam, she has a gun! Those things hurt. I know!_

She turned her stare on him briefly, and for the first time, he saw the Comte's cold determination still in her, rising from where it had been buried. _No. I remember what happened last time I left you. I will not do it again._

_I'll be fine! _he said desperately. _It's you she wants to hurt, not me._

_Mon ange,_ she said gently, and the words were an arrow in his soul, _do you even know what she is? She's not a person, she's evil. Old evil. Did she tell she loves you, mon ange, and smile her pretty smile, and promise not to hurt you if only you'd choose her?_

_How did you...?_

_Because there's more to the story than you know, mon ange. _The eyes that were focused on him appeared almost grey for an instant, and hauntingly sad. _After you killed yourself, she came to see me. She brought an army with her, mon ange, and massacred my people. And me, finally. When I knew what she was._ Pain flowing through to him, and underneath...

He could feel Tam fighting against this knowledge, feel her fear. She was scared of losing herself in these memories; of forgetting who Tamara Slone was.

"What is she?" he asked gently.

A dry laugh resounded about him, but it did not belong to Tam. Eleanor Saxoine was chuckling quietly, though her eyes were nothing human. Nothing recognisable.

"She'd call it evil," Eleanor said softly. "But all I am is death, pretty."

He shook his head dumbly, frozen by the inhuman artfulness that glimmered in her face. Something old, and something sly that tilted her smile into a crooked twist and moved with jerky speed.

"I like your fear," she whispered. "It tastes like honey."

She feeds off fear, he thought. There was something...something...

"You're a wraith," he said flatly. Yes. Blue had told him once, when they were discussing extinct Night creatures. Wraiths, the trapped spirits of the cruel who refused to leave the world and instead, infested body after body until that person died. Malign, mad beings who lived for the suffering of others, who fed on it.

He had sometimes thought Blue was a wraith. But Blue wasn't mad. Only wrong.

"Well done, pretty!" she said brightly. "Now which of you goes first? Her, I think...she's only afraid for you...but you're afraid for both of you."

She raised the gun.

Aspen had never even imagined anything could move so fast.

But Blue leapt through the window like a burning bullet, dragonfire haloed around him, knocking the gun.

A picture on Tam's wall shattered with the erratic shot as Aspen threw himself across the room and pulled her down behind the door. "Stay down," he whispered, leaving Blue to do what he was so, so good at.

Black fire crawled across Eleanor Saxoine as Blue wrapped his hands around her throat quite calmly, and the sounds that came from her mouth were unearthly and dreadful. Rising higher, and higher, and higher-

A pale green light seemed to leap from her body, and Aspen thought he glimpsed a screaming, raging face in it for a second before it was scattered into ethereal dust.

"Talk about regular exorcise," was Blue only dry remark. "Interesting. And we thought they'd died out."

The human girl was limp in Blue's grasp, unconscious.

"Oh my god," Tam was repeating into his shoulder, over and over again. Aspen tried not to wince at the pain, but let her clutch him with feverish hands, begging him to tell her that she hadn't seen that, that it was a nightmare, a dream, anything... "Stop me remembering," she was saying, "please, I don't want to see. Aspen, Aspen...it hurts so much..."

He held her head in the curve of his neck as he saw Blue drop the human to the ground. Take out a knife. Spread Eleanor Saxoine's hand on the floor. Cut off the trigger finger.

"No more hunts," Blue said softly. His smile gleamed like dawn on glass. "We're even now, Martin."

"We're even," Aspen agreed, as he felt Tam begin to cry into his shoulder. No one could be strong forever. "Take that vermin with you, Malefici. She doesn't belong here."

Not in Tam's home, this place of security and comfort, of family and friends. This home that he would make his, because it was quite clear to him now that Tam needed him too, even if she didn't always know it. She didn't understand the Nightworld. She didn't know what she was dealing with.

And even though she cried for a long time in his arms, amidst the wreckage of her room, Aspen thought that he had never been so content.

_It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right  
I hope you had the time of your life._

X - X - X - X - X

Comments would be totally, completely, eternally adored!


	10. Chapter Ten

It is done! Finito! :-) Just like to say thank you to all of you reviewed last part - it was muchly, muchly appreciated. Thanks you: **Night Goddess, Persphone, Starwisher, Dark Princess, Eleyne, Linnet Jo, Meg, Cynical Leaf, Kitty Katt, Angelic Angel, Aquilla **and the magnificent **Me.**

Thanks to all of you who've commented - it's much adored, I know you take time out of your day to read and tell me what you think and you don't have to - so thank you, Persephone, Dead Flower, Painted Empathy, Starwisher, MyosotisLuv, Stargazer, Kitty Katt, Me, Kitten, Night Goddess, Tough Fluff, Dark Angel, Myst, Aquilla, WolfGrrl, Keya, Delphine, Cyncial Leaf, Cathan White, Diomede, Jen, Fin, Angelic Angel, Linnet Jo, Gwenseth, Jezebel, Danel, Starseeker, Angelphire, Meg, Ice Princess, and last but certainly not least, Eleyne - you have been absolutely stupendous, I was floored by the response! Thank you!

I love knowing what you think - it makes my day! Criticism is welcomed with open arms, it improves the story.

The song is, of course, the gorgeous 'Hands' by Jewel, which I had to put in here.

**Remember Part Ten**

_We'll fight, not out of spite but 'cause someone must stand up for what's right  
And where there's a man who has no voice, there ours shall all sing._

It was a rare day when anyone surprised Blue Malefici.

Aspen managed it by running over his foot.

Blue was staring thoughtfully into the distance, over in the direction of Chatoya Irkil who was sitting with her bizarre friends. Aspen saw her grin as he hit the brakes and, by good aim and timing, Blue.

He was quite pleased at the momentary narrowing of Blue's eyes and the high-power glare.

_Let me handle this, _he said without looking at Tam. She was sat beside him, uneasily tracing the black symbol on her arm. _Blue's less likely to hurt me._

_All right, _she said softly, touching his hand. _You be careful. Don't go all crazy._

_I'll try,_ he said, and that was more than he had ever done before.

"Hi," he purred, leaning out to flash a neon-bright, crazed smile at Blue. Anger felt good, warming him. "Want to tell me why the hell you marked my girlfriend for any assassin out there to hunt?"

"I'm sorry, you ran over my foot to discuss trifles?" Blue said, raising an eyebrow. The guy was an iceberg, Aspen often thought, with nine-tenths under the surface and the ability to sink anyone stupid enough to try and take shortcuts with him.

"It's not a trifle," he said flatly. "I don't want her killed."

"Diddums," the vampire drawled. "Do really think I give a damn about what you want? She's vermin, Martin, and people like us do not date people like her."

"I do."

"Tasted her yet?" Blue asked wickedly, innuendo on every word.

"That's none of your goddamn business!"

Furious, Aspen leapt out of the car, not knowing how his eyes had lit up, one an oozing crimson, the other icy-pale grey.

"Aspen!" Tam shouted, and he could sense her fumbling with her seatbelt, about to jump out and rescue him.

_You stay there,_ he shot at her. _He's my kind, okay, and this is how you have to deal with Blue._

"She looks sweet," the cobalt-haired boy drawled, his voice sounding like a lion's purr to Aspen's ears. "How is she?"

An incensed Aspen slammed his fist at Blue's infuriatingly arrogant face.

With most people, that would have been a seriously fatal error. However, he wasn't quite sure why, but Blue seemed to like him.

It didn't stop him hitting Aspen against the car so hard it left a dent.

"My, aren't you quite the antagonist today," the lamia remarked, stepping back and in his usual effortless and cavalier manner, telepathically coercing every human that was staring to look away. His lip curled slowly. "Remnants of a lost life? PMT perhaps?"

Aspen glared. "Would you just shut up about that? It's not my fault I used to be a girl!"

He didn't realise how loud he had said that until he looked around and saw Chatoya Irkil's wide eyes and open mouth.

"I was born that way," he muttered more quietly

That sinful, annoying smile was beginning to curve. "Are you sure? Maybe it's Maybelline."

"I hope someone tortures you horribly," Aspen snapped.

"Therese made me sit through _The Sound of Music_," the vampire said, with a roll of his eyes. "Does that count? Honestly, her passion for all things vermin is ridiculous. How on earth am I supposed to prepare the next stage of the scheme while she's trying to solve a problem like Maria, and incidentally, brown paper packages tied up with string contain small metal surprises that will blow you _into _string, in my experience."

"In which case it's so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, goodnight?" Aspen said with false brightness. "I want you to take that mark off Tam's arm."

"One should always aspire to the impossible," Blue said coolly. "It's good for the soul."

He bared his teeth at the lamia. "You can't push me around like vermin, Malefici. I want that mark off now. I don't even know how you managed to burn the damn thing onto her arm-"

"Dragon magick."

It was like time stopped, and there was an awful, dead silence before the boom of his heartbeat sounded in his ears. No, no, no, Aspen thought, don't let me have heard that because if it's true, this could change everything.

That much power in Blue's hands...no, that can't be right.

"What?"

"There are spells which will steal a dragon's powers from it while it sleeps," Blue said patiently, that cunning face that he had known for years and years becoming strange once again. He searched the sharp lines of it, looking for signs that there was a supernova sleeping there, for anything but the detached ice that was all Blue had ever showed to the world. "I invested in one."

"Whoa..." Aspen said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around the idea. Dragon powers. What he couldn't do with those. In fact, never mind what he couldn't do, what he could do. "I thought I was the crazy one round here."

"You're the crazy one," Blue agreed. Flash of the smile that meant only trouble. "I'm the smart one. Now, you were about to start threatening me...?"

He knew why Blue had told him. To make it clear that as he always damn well did, Blue Malefici would carry on in his merry, destructive way and woe betide anyone who crossed his smouldering path.

But Blue thought he knew him.

He doesn't know what I'll do for Tam, Aspen thought. He doesn't realise that even if he harnessed all the powers in the universe, I'd still risk fighting him. Just for her.

"If she dies, I'll kill you," he said quietly.

Blue flicked his fingers. "Be still my beating heart."

The passenger door opened, and Tam stomped out, her eyes wide and exasperated. He could tell without looking at her that she was wearing her mother's skunk-eye glare, the one that meant heads would roll.

"You don't have a heart," she said. Her anger fizzled inside his head like a smoking barbecue and Aspen tried to warn her that annoying Blue was never a good idea, especially if you were human, but she wasn't listening.

"Of course I do," the lamia said scornfully."In fact, I have a collection. They keep so well."

"Don't be revolting!" Tam snarled, so angry Aspen decided he had better get hold of her before she took a swing at Blue. And of course, it meant he got to touch her. Either way, a good idea.

"Tam," Aspen said in her ear, "Don't lecture him. He really doesn't like being lectured. It gets him all homicidal."

_What'll happen if I'm polite?_ she asked, a little calmer. Her mind was a strange combination of feelings he had never seen as fitting together; the scent of daffodils, the texture of melted chocolate, the brightness of light in kaleidoscope, the ferocity of sunlight in the desert.

_We'll get to grow old together. Older, anyway._

He hadn't told her, or let her know, but he was planning on growing old with her. It had been a month, four blissful weeks since Eleanor Saxoine had been dragged out of Tam's room by Blue.

Four weeks with Tam's family. He had been walked in on by Celia in the bathroom (happily, he had a towel on), wrestled by Billy over the TV remote (he lost), glared at by Tam's mother for leaving his plate out on the side and he was even trying to eat a little more than he usually did, because Mrs Slone put the fear of god into him.

And she had moved him - pointedly - into the spare room at the other end of the corridor.

She might be bespelled to accept him in the house, but in the same room as her daughter was a little too much. He didn't mind though - every night, Tam hopped across the corridor (literally, to avoid the squeaky floorboards) and they talked and kissed and sometimes a little more.

He was starting to feel better about being touched. But some things still scared him.

He still woke up screaming a lot.

But one of the Slones would always trot in. Last night, it had been Billy, explaining that he got bad dreams too sometimes. Before that, it was Tam, accompanied by Celia, who told him stories about each other until he was laughing so hard he couldn't even remember the dream. One night, it had even been Mrs Slone who had told him to stop making such a bloody racket.

He might have been hurt if she hadn't brought a steaming cup of some vermin stuff called hot chocolate with her, and told him that she thought he might not turn out to be the worst thing that had ever happened to Tam, and left a tea light burning by his bed.

The Slones were his family. And Aspen intended it to stay that way.

So now, before Tam could open her mouth and attempt being polite, he jumped in.

"You do know," he said, watching Blue's reaction, "that I'm giving up the day job."

He knew Tam didn't like it when he talked about killing people.

Blue's eyes held an assessing, thoughtful quality as he looked at Tam that Aspen didn't like at all. "For her?"

"Yup."

Gold was flowing into Blue's eyes like raindrops down a pain of glass, pooling at the bottom of his iris. Uh-oh. "Just like that?"

"No..." he said slowly. "When I've found someone to take over."

"And the plans?" Blue said with an icy, worrying composure.

"You can let whoever I choose in on them," Aspen said. "They'll be an outsider anyway. No one in Pursang's good enough."

"All right. Fair enough."

What? No calculated nastiness, no deceptively subtle threats? "What do you mean 'all right'?"

"One condition." Blue must have seen his hesitation, because he added, "Agree, and I'll do something about the mark on your sweetheart's arm."

"What?" Aspen said guardedly.

Flash of a smile. "You do it the traditional way. Rite of conquest. Fair single combat."

He wavered. It would take longer that way...but he'd get rid of the damn mark... "You're on."

"Good," Blue said, and snapped his fingers. "Ms Slone, your arm."

Tam held out her arm, and Blue wrapped a hand over the mark. Aspen watched, fascinated, as oily blacks sparks sizzled around the lamia's flesh. So that was how Blue had kept him alive after he'd been shot.

He let go.

"The mark's still there," Aspen said sharply. Tam was rubbing her arm like it itched, biting her lip.

"It is. But I've added a little something to it." Blue looked alarmingly smug. "It'll start tingling whenever danger gets within a hundred metres of you."

Tam was still clutching her arm. "Are you telling me I've got a spider sense?"

"I am indeed," Blue said cheerfully. "I'll be interested to see how you survive. _Au revoir, mon ange_."

Both of them froze at the endearment. The question formed on Aspen's lips-

Next thing either of them knew, he had hijacked the car and gone.

The question went unasked. He and Tam stared at each other, and he could see his own shock echoed in her eyes. How had Blue known?

"Bastard," they said in unison.

X - X - X - X - X

Late evening, and Aspen was holding Tam's hand and listening to Celia's running commentary on the television programme he was being forced to watch. The only comfort was that he was squished on the big sofa with the person he loved most in the world, and Tam's mother was nowhere in sight.

"And he got her pregnant, only she's married to his brother, who used to be a woman who dated her cousin's boyfriend's uncle, who ran over his dog that he was bought by his ex-girlfriend's first cousin who performed open heart surgery on his fifty-sixth half-step-cousin-in-law-nine times removed..."

Or something to that effect. All Aspen knew was that there was much clutching of men, swooning of women, gasping, general shock-horror factor and possibly the worst dialogue he had ever heard.

"I don't think we need this soap musical when we have our own," he whispered in Tam's ear.

"Soap opera," she murmured back. "Aspen, I'm worried about Rob."

"I know," he said simply, stroking her hair. "But he'll come back. He was probably just upset when Therese changed him. She shouldn't have done that."

He didn't really know Rob Slivan, the jock who'd fought him, Tam's best friend, but she seemed to like the guy. He'd run off a month back, and Tam hadn't seen or heard anything of him since. He didn't like how it made her face cloud over, and decided he'd try searching for this vermin...no, ex-vermin, soon.

Ellie Saxoine was gone too. And with her gone, the hunts had ended.

Plus the fact Blue had methodically and precisely mind-wiped every last one of the group and given them a sudden compulsion for long, quiet evenings spent playing canasta.

Which had seemed a little nice of Blue, until Aspen discovered the contract that had been not-so-subtly distributed about the Nightworld, with a very specific, unique and vicious death arranged for each one in years to come. The first in five years, the last to occur in thirty. All those vermin would die.

He didn't tell Tam.

"-and he's about to declare his true love for her..." Celia wound down suddenly. "Aspen?"

"Yeah, brat?" he said, grinning as she threw a cushion at him.

"Do you love Tam?"

Ah...

"Yeah," Billy said, with the big toothy smile that usually meant he was about to pummel Aspen. "Are you in looooooove?"

"'Course I do," Aspen said briskly, hoping they would leave it alone.

"Shut up," his soulmate muttered through gritted teeth. "Cee, leave it."

"Why don't you tell her then?" the smaller, more annoying version of Tam said.

"Is this what our kids will be like?" he asked.

"Kids?" Tam said in horror. "We're having kids?" She lowered her voice, seeing Billy and Celia listening intently. "We haven't even got to the...you know..."

"Loads of them," he confirmed quietly. "And we'll get to the...you know... You're the only person I want to with, and if we're going to get married-"

"Married?" Tam shrieked.

"Yeah, in a couple of years, of course. You know, when we're both eighteen-"

"Eighteen?"

"You sure you got a girlfriend and not a parrot?" Billy inquired innocently. He and Celia were grinning hugely. "You really going to marry Tam?"

"Yeah..."

"Mom'll flip!" Celia said gleefully.

"'Mom'," Mrs Slone's cool voice said and she strode in, and set her briefcase down on the floor, "is back."

"Mom," Billy said, "Aspen wants to marry Tam when they're eighteen!"

"Is this true?" Mrs Slone demanded, sitting herself on the edge of a chair. In her shoulder-padded business suit, she looked like she was a piece of Kevlar short of the All-Stars. Aspen couldn't shake the unnerving feeling that the wrong answer meant she'd charge him down.

"Uh...yeah..." he said meekly. He gripped Tam's hand tightly, wishing she was a little taller so he could cower behind her.

"At eighteen?"

Aspen quailed under the stare he got. "Nineteen?" he offered. The stare deepened. "Twenty-"

Nuclear glare.

"-one?"

Mrs Slone blinked, and then looked at her daughter. "I didn't think I'd ever say this, honey, but I think you might have found one that's worth spending time with." She scowled at Aspen again. "Once you start going to church and eating properly and dressing less like a hoodlum."

Aspen could only nod in the face of such authority.

As Mrs Slone strode out, Tam collapsed into helpless giggles. "She'll make you sign a contract," she warned.

He shrugged. "I'll sign my life away for you," he said in an attempt at gallantry.

"Thank you," she said, and that look appeared in his eyes that Aspen loved so much. The one that was heavy and potent, like the air before a storm, and meant she was going to kiss him-

A cushion hit them, and Billy howled. "Oh, cut it out!"

"Later," Aspen muttered to her, and strove to look innocent as Tam's mother came back in.

X - X - X - X - X

"Occasionally we're disturbingly normal. The rest of the time...disturbing."

Rewind. Squeals as the tape flickered backwards, as the figures in it moved in swift reversal.

The camera was focused on the face of the boy with the spiky, short cobalt hair and eyes that were a soft fluid gold. He was flanked on either side; Aspen on his left, and a girl with a tumble of wild, gypsy-black hair that was streaked with impossible gold and copper bands that cluing to the round swell of her cheekbones and chin.

It would have taken one who knew her well to know it was Therese Orage.

But Rob Slivan knew her so, so well.

"Back more," he said in a voice that was a rasp. He couldn't remember how long it had been. Only that he had run off when he had realised what she had made him. Out into the ghost roads of Ryars Valley. Starving, thinking he could kill himself because he wouldn't drink blood, he wasn't some inhuman animal.

Wrong.

When your lungs felt like a mass of bubbling acid, when your limbs ached like they were filled with wet sand, when there was only the hunger and you in all the world...you were just an animal.

"Here," Rob said curtly.

He missed his family, but not as much as he thought. They'd had a human son, not a vampire. That Rob Slivan had been another person. One who cared about stupid things, like tennis games. One who'd been stupid and chivalrous and innocent.

That got you nowhere.

Play. The girl leaning forward and licking her lips slowly. He stared into her unaware, oil slick eyes and made her a promise.

"We are not your worst nightmares. You won't fear us, or think about us, or even see us if you pass us. We're the things you haven't even dreamed of." A long pause, while he looked at her satisfied, triumphant eyes. "That's why we'll kill you before you even know."

She was very stupid, Therese Orage.

Leaving her house so trustingly unlocked. Not bothering to investigate her cramped, dim attic. Leaving this video where a pair of intrepid, cunning people could find them.

He looked at Ellie Saxoine. As a vampire, she was beautiful beyond anything a mortal man could bear to see. But he wasn't mortal, and he didn't give a damn how pretty she was.

"I don't want to kill her," he said. "I want to take away all her power. I'll make her helpless like she made me helpless."

Ellie laughed. Frenzied joy filled her now, he could see it in her feverish eyes, her ever-present smile. She was a lot nicer this way. A lot more useful. She spun the credit card between her fingers. "I'll look into it," she promised.

I'm going to haunt you like you haunted me, Rob Slivan thought. You'd better look out.

I'll make you regret what you made me.

But that would be another tale.

X - X - X - X - X

The middle of the night was cold and dark, but Tam was warm. She was huddled up against Aspen's side, and the talk was drowsy and infrequent now. Her head was tucked on his chest, hair half-hiding her face. The only light came from the liquid diamond glow of his eyes, for once the same colour.

She had said the words to him so many times in the last month. Casually, off-handedly, intimately. I love you, she had said, and smiled at his childlike joy. He had never answered, only been enchanted and elated.

She knew how hard he found it to say the words.

It was part of the desperately broken creature he was. The one who was scared of the dark. The one who touched her so hesitantly, and was so incredibly sweet and careful of her. Whose gifts weren't flowers or teddy bears, but a kitten and a hand-carven box inlaid with ivory.

He was a strange boyfriend, and he hated her friends as much as they detested him, and he still had the scary, mad moments, and he wasn't the brightest candle in the chandelier, but he had an intelligence that dealt with the real world, not with history or English or maths.

And Tam found that his friends - not Blue or Therese, but the grungy, carefree kids who were into extreme sports, were a lot nicer than any of her friends. Aspen had even persuaded her to go rollerblading on the halfpipe built in one of the fields. She had screamed all the way down, and then fallen over.

She had broken her nails, and cut her face, and to the surprise of his friends, she laughed herself stupid.  
They had liked her a lot more after that.

And then she had gaped as her boyfriend did the kind of stunts she'd only seen on TV.

But now he was simply looking at her. In any one else, she would have found it intimidating. In Aspen, she knew it was adoration.

Not halfpipes or lessons or wild moonlight hunts. No guns, no people, no problems. Just them. She heard his soft whisper, and it made her shiver delightedly.

"I do love you."

"I'll remember that," she said, and did. Forever.

_My hands are small I know, but they're not yours, they are my own.  
They're not yours, they are my own and  
I am never broken._

- FIN -

Thanks for reading - I'd be thrilled if you'd tell me what you thought! Love ya do :-)

Next up, _Chimera._

- Kiana


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